History of New Orleans

Throughout the 19th century, New Orleans was the largest port in the Southern United States, exporting most of the nation's cotton output and other farm products to Western Europe and New England.

With its rich and unique cultural and architectural heritage, New Orleans remains a major destination for live music, tourism, conventions, and sporting events and annual Mardi Gras celebrations.

[4][5] French explorers, fur trappers and traders arrived in the area by the 1690s, some making settlements amid the Native American village of thatched huts along the Bayou.

The regent allowed Scottish economist John Law to create a private bank and a financing scheme that succeeded in increasing the colonial population of New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana.

The priest-chronicler Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix described New Orleans in 1721 as a place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators; he seems to have been the first, however, to predict for it an imperial future.

Through Pinckney's Treaty signed on October 27, 1795, Spain granted the United States "Right of Deposit" in New Orleans, allowing Americans to use the city's port facilities.

A French prefect, Pierre Clément de Laussat, who had only arrived in New Orleans on March 23, 1803, formally took control of Louisiana for France on November 30, only to hand it over to the U.S. on December 20, 1803.

[19] The next dozen years were marked by the beginnings of self-government in city and state; by the excitement attending the Aaron Burr conspiracy (in the course of which, in 1806–1807, General James Wilkinson practically put New Orleans under martial law); and by the War of 1812.

The American government managed to obtain early information of the enterprise and prepared to meet it with forces (regular, militia, and naval) under the command of Jackson.

The British advance was made by way of Lake Borgne, and the troops landed at a fisherman's village on December 23, 1814, Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham taking command there two days later (Christmas).

An immediate advance on the still insufficiently prepared defenses of the Americans might have led to the capture of the city; but this was not attempted, and both sides limited themselves to relatively small skirmishes and a naval battle while awaiting reinforcements.

At last in the early morning of January 8, 1815 (after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed but before the news had reached across the Atlantic), a direct attack was made on the now strongly-entrenched line of defenders at Chalmette, near the Mississippi River.

Although there was an existing coin shortage, the situation became much worse because in 1836 President Andrew Jackson had issued an executive order, called a specie circular, which demanded that all land transactions in the United States be conducted in cash, thus increasing the need for minted money.

Forts Jackson and St. Philip, isolated and continuously bombarded by Farragut's mortar boats, surrendered on the 28th, and soon afterwards the military portion of the expedition occupied the city[12] resulting in the Capture of New Orleans.

[33] The commander, General Benjamin Butler, subjected New Orleans to a rigorous martial law so tactlessly administered as greatly to intensify the hostility of South and North.

On September 14, 1874, armed forces led by the White League defeated the integrated Republican metropolitan police and their allies in pitched battle in the French Quarter and along Canal Street.

Nevertheless, the revolution of 1874 is generally regarded as the independence day of Reconstruction, although not until President Hayes withdrew the troops in 1877 and the Packard government fell did the Democrats actually hold control of the state and city.

From hotels, parks, museums and restaurants, black citizens were denied access through a rigid system of Jim Crow, but some in the city objected to the State of Louisiana's attempt to enforce strict racial segregation, and hoped to overturn the law with a test case in 1892.

In the spring of 1896 Mayor Fitzpatrick, leader of the city's Bourbon Democratic organization, left office after a scandal-ridden administration, his chosen successor badly defeated by reform candidate Walter C. Flower.

The levees protecting the city from high water events on the Mississippi and Lake compounded this problem, as they also kept rainwater in, which tended to concentrate in the lower areas.

Both of these moves came to be regarded as mistakes long after the fact, and the streetcars returned to a portion of Canal Street at the end of the 1990s, and construction to restore the entire line was completed in April 2004.

The levees & pumping system succeeded in protecting the city proper from major flooding, but many areas of the new suburbs in Jefferson Parish were deluged, and Moisant Airport was shut down under 2 feet (0.61 m) of water.

In 1958, Fernando Rios, a Mexican tour guide in the city for work, was killed in an act of gay bashing involving several students from Tulane.

"MR GO" failed to live up to commercial expectations, and from its early days it was blamed for freshwater marsh-killing saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion, increasing the area's risk of hurricane storm surge.

A breach in the Industrial Canal produced catastrophic flooding of the city's Lower 9th Ward as well as the neighboring towns of Arabi and Chalmette in St. Bernard parish.

On the afternoon of Saturday, December 14, 1996, the M/V Bright Field freightliner/bulk cargo vessel slammed into the Riverwalk mall and hotel complex on the Poydras Street Wharf along the Mississippi River.

[48] On August 29, 2005, an estimated 600,000 people were temporarily evacuated from Greater New Orleans when projected tracks of Hurricane Katrina included a possible major hit of the city.

In the aftermath of the storm, what has been called "the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States" flooded the majority of the city when the levee and floodwall system protecting New Orleans failed.

[52][needs update] The New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl XLIV in the 2009 NFL season, bringing hope and joy to the city still recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

In 2010 Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu won the mayor's race over ten other candidates with some 66% of the vote on the first round, with widespread support across racial, demographic, and neighborhood boundaries.