The Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) documents a wide variety of subjects at the local and regional levels. Subject strengths include art, business, Carnival, the Civil War, the environment, Jewish studies, LGBTQ+ studies, medicine, politics, social welfare, literature, and women's studies. Tulane University’s archival program began on May 3, 1889, when Marie Antoinette Eulalie Courmes Dolhonde presented a letter from Thomas Jefferson to M. duPlantier to the Charles T. Howard Memorial Library. This donation marked the beginning of what would eventually become the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC).
In 1938, the Howard Library, the Newcomb Library from Newcomb College, and the Tilton Library from Tulane University merged to form Tulane’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library (HTML). The Howard Library, which opened in 1889, functioned as the city library for New Orleans while privately held. Its holdings are a significant reason why LaRC today preserves one of the finest 19th-century Louisiana libraries. Although these libraries had intermittently acquired Louisiana research materials, it was not until 1956 that HTML hired Consuelo “Connie” Garza Griffith to oversee archival and special collections. The new Special Collections department initially had three sections: Rare Books, the Manuscripts Department (for archival collections), and the Louisiana Collection (for books and printed resources about Louisiana). These were soon followed by the Hogan Jazz Archive (1958), the Tulane University Archives (1962), and the Southeastern Architectural Archive (1979). In 2009, the Manuscripts Department and Louisiana Collection merged to form the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC), which has grown over more than 120 years to encompass almost four linear miles of archival documents, books, maps, images, ephemera, and other resources central to the study of Louisiana.