New Orleans

• 1. Introduction

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  New Orleans sits roughly 105 miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, cradled between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, on ground that is, in many places, already below the surface of the surrounding water. Before the first French colonists arrived, the Choctaw people called this place Bulbancha, a word meaning "land of many tongues." That name, scholars believe, was a contraction of words meaning "there are foreign speakers." It proved prophetic. More than three centuries later, New Orleans is still a place where languages overlap, cultures fuse, and the past never quite lets go. How did a city in a river delta, sinking slowly into soft clay, become one of the most layered and consequential cities in American history? And what does it mean to love a place that the water has always threatened to take back?

• 2. Founded on Foreign Ground

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  In the spring of 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville laid out a settlement on land long inhabited by the Chitimacha people, acting on behalf of the French Mississippi Company. The city he planted was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orleans, who was then serving as regent of France for the young Louis XV. That political flattery encoded an entire colonial project in the city's name. Within a decade, the fragile colony was already fracturing. In 1729, the Natchez people attacked Fort Rosalie and killed more than 200 French colonists. Governor Etienne Perier's retaliatory campaign effectively destroyed the Natchez as a people, but it soured France's relationship with virtually every Native nation in the territory, feeding directly into the Chickasaw Wars of the 1730s. Meanwhile, a separate crisis was unfolding on the labor front. By the early 1720s, enslaved Africans were arriving in significant numbers, and in 1724 the Code Noir formalized the brutal legal framework governing their lives. Out of that violence, something remarkable was also taking root: a distinct Afro-Creole culture, weaving African traditions together with Catholicism and the French language, giving rise to Louisiana Voodoo and the Louisiana Creole language. The city's first permanent institution for women's education, the Ursuline convent, was founded in 1727 by nuns sponsored by the Company of the Indies, and it remains the foundation of several schools that still operate in the city today.

• 3. Spain, Rebellion, and the Vieux Carre

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  France gave Louisiana to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and New Orleans residents did not accept the transfer quietly. In 1768, local leaders staged what is known as the Louisiana Rebellion, briefly seizing the city and sending a delegation to France to beg Louis XV to take Louisiana back. The king refused. Spanish rule held, and the city's character shifted again. Nearly all of the 18th-century architecture that survives in the French Quarter today actually dates from the Spanish period, with one significant exception: the Old Ursuline Convent. The Spanish renamed the city Nueva Orleans and used that name until 1800. During the American Revolutionary War, Spanish governor Bernardo de Galvez y Madrid led a campaign against the British from the city in 1779, making New Orleans a key supply hub for the American cause. From the 1760s onward, Filipino settlers also began arriving in the region, an early chapter in the city's long history as a destination for displaced and migrating peoples. The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 returned the city to French control, but Napoleon sold both New Orleans and the entire Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, and the anglicized name New Orleans came with the transfer.

• 4. Slavery, Commerce, and the Antebellum Peak

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  Between 1791 and 1810, thousands of refugees from the Haitian Revolution poured into New Orleans, both white colonists and free people of color, many of them bringing enslaved people with them. A single migration event in 1809 brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 enslaved people of primarily African descent, effectively doubling the city's population. The city became 63 percent Black, a higher proportion than Charleston, South Carolina, at the same time. On January 8 through 11, 1811, roughly 500 enslaved people in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes rose up in what historians call the largest slave rebellion in United States history, marching south toward the city before being suppressed by the militia. By 1840, despite that history of violence and resistance, New Orleans had become the wealthiest and third-most populous city in the entire country. It housed the largest slave market in the nation, particularly after the United States ended the international slave trade in 1808. The domestic trade surged enormously; enslaved people were collectively valued at half a billion dollars, and the broader economy built around that trade generated billions more. Free people of color, many of them Francophone and mixed-race, formed a distinct artisan and professional class even as the majority of Black residents remained in bondage. Yellow fever and other tropical diseases killed more than 150,000 New Orleans residents over the course of the 19th century, shadows over a city that was, by any economic measure, thriving.

• 5. War, Occupation, and Vanishing French

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  Union Navy forces captured New Orleans in April 1862 following the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, and General Benjamin Butler was appointed military governor. Confederate sympathizers in the city nicknamed him "Beast" Butler after he issued an order warning that women who harassed his troops would be treated as prostitutes plying their trade in the streets. He was also called "Spoons" Butler over accusations that his men looted silver flatware from occupied homes. One of Butler's most lasting acts was abolishing French-language instruction in city schools. Statewide measures in 1864 and again in 1868 deepened the English-only policy. Yet the French language was stubbornly persistent. As late as 1902, one quarter of the city's population spoke French in ordinary daily conversation, and another two-quarters could understand it perfectly. As late as 1945, many elderly Creole women spoke no English at all. The last major French-language newspaper, L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans, ceased publication on the 27th of December 1923, after 96 years of continuous operation. During Reconstruction, Louisiana was readmitted to the Union in 1868, and P.B.S. Pinchback briefly served as governor in 1872, becoming the first governor of African descent in United States history. New Orleans also operated a racially integrated public school system during this period. That integration did not last. The 1892 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which enshrined "separate but equal" as constitutional law, was deliberately arranged by New Orleans's Comite des Citoyens when they recruited Homer Plessy, a local man, to sit in a whites-only railcar departing the city for Covington.

• 6. Jazz, Decline, and Civil Rights

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  New Orleans is the only North American city that allowed enslaved people to gather in public and play their native music, largely in Congo Square, now located within Louis Armstrong Park. That permission gave birth, in the early 20th century, to jazz. African American brass bands formed soon after, starting a tradition that continues over a century later. The city's relative national importance, however, was already slipping. By 1950, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta had all exceeded New Orleans in population. In 1960, Miami surpassed it too, even as the city reached its historic population peak of 627,525. In 1929, a streetcar strike caused serious unrest and, as a side note to history, is also credited with the creation of the po' boy sandwich. The 1956 Sugar Bowl became a flashpoint for civil rights when Georgia's governor tried to block the participation of Pitt Panthers fullback Bobby Grier, an African American player. Georgia Tech president Blake R. Van Leer defied the governor and the game went ahead. Four years later, six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School, becoming the first child of color to attend a previously all-white Southern school. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in New Orleans, and lunch counter sit-ins took place in Canal Street department stores. Tourism filled some of the economic gap left by declining river trade and manufacturing, but by the late 20th century it had become the city's dominant industry, a $5.5 billion sector accounting for 40 percent of city tax revenues.

• 7. Katrina and the City Below the Water

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  Raymond B. Seed, a prominent engineer, called the failure of the federal levee system during Hurricane Katrina on the 29th of August 2005 "the worst engineering disaster in the world since Chernobyl." Floodwalls and levees built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers failed below their own design specifications. Eighty percent of the city flooded. More than 1,500 people were recorded as having died in Louisiana, most of them in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of survivors who had not evacuated made their way to the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans Morial Convention Center as shelters of last resort. Hurricane Katrina displaced 800,000 people in total. Black and African American residents, renters, the elderly, and low-income households were disproportionately affected. The last mandatory evacuation before Katrina was the first in the city's history; another followed three years later for Hurricane Gustav. By July 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the population at 223,000, down from a pre-storm count of 454,865. By summer 2007, the city had recovered approximately 60 percent of its pre-Katrina population. Ten years after the storm, it had reached 80 percent of its 2000 census level. Since then, the city's 2020 population reached 383,997, yet that figure is still 21 percent lower than the city had in 2000. Scientists and engineers have warned for decades that Louisiana has lost an estimated 2,000 square miles of coastline since the beginning of the 20th century. Congress has allocated $7 billion toward flood protection, but a report by the National Academy of Engineering concluded that levees, no matter how large, cannot provide absolute protection. On the 29th of August 2021, the 16th anniversary of Katrina's landfall, Hurricane Ida, a category 4 storm, struck near Port Fourchon.