Haiti's history behind the famous New Orleans elongated house

Few elements of the New Orleans cityscape speak to the intersection of architecture, sociology and geography so well as the shotgun house. Once scorned, now cherished, shotguns shed light on patterns of cultural diffusion, class and residential settlement, social preferences and construction methods.

The shotgun house is not an architectural style; rather, it is a structural typology -- what folklorist John Michael Vlach described as "a philosophy of space, a culturally determined sense of dimension."

A typology, or type, may be draped in any fashion. Thus we have shotgun houses adorned in Italianate, Eastlake and other styles, just as there are Creole and Federalist style townhouses, and Spanish colonial and Greek revival cottages.

Tradition holds that the name "shotgun" derives from the notion of firing bird shot through the front door and out the rear without touching a wall. The term itself postdates the shotgun's late-19th-century heyday, not appearing in print until the early 20th century.