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New Orleans
New Orleans is a city in southeastern Louisiana, on the Mississippi River, north of its entrance into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans is the seat of, and coextensive with, Orleans Parish. Long known for its unique and vivid cultural blend, the city is now a major commercial and tourism center for the South and one of the busiest ports in the United States. The city covers a land area of 467.7 sq km (180.6 sq mi).
New Orleans lies largely below sea level. Because the city experiences high annual rainfall, a system of levees has been built to guard against flooding. These levees line the shores of the Mississippi and of Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city on the north. In addition, New Orleans has a powerful drainage system that can pump off billions of liters of water a day.
The small villages of the Quinapisa and Tangipahoa peoples were located in the vicinity of present-day New Orleans when the site was first visited by a European explorer, the Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, in 1682. The site was visited in 1699 by another French explorer, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville. Recognizing the importance of the location, he established a settlement there in 1718 after becoming governor of the Louisiana Territory. He named it Nouvelle-Orléans, for the duc d'Orléans, regent of France. In 1722 the town was made the capital of the French colony. Following the partition of Louisiana between England and Spain in 1763, New Orleans became the capital of Spanish Louisiana. A rebellion (1768-1769) against Spanish rule was quickly suppressed. In 1800 New Orleans was secretly ceded to France; in 1803 it was formally ceded to France and then, by the terms of the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States.
New Orleans was incorporated as a city in 1805. In 1812 Louisiana became a U.S. state with New Orleans as its capital. The city was the state capital from 1812 to 1830 and then again from 1831 to 1849. In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812, New Orleans was defended from a British attack by American forces led by General Andrew Jackson (later the seventh president of the United States) in a confrontation known as the Battle of New Orleans. Between 1810 and 1850 steamboat traffic on the Mississippi River made the city one of the busiest ports in North America; by 1840 New Orleans was the fourth-largest city in the United States. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) the city was a major port and military center for the Confederacy and was an early objective of Union troops. It was captured by a Union fleet in 1862 and remained a Union stronghold for the rest of the war. After the war, shipping activities declined, but by the end of World War I (1914-1918) they had begun to increase again.
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