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Deconstructing History: New Orleans | History

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Dr. John - Down in New Orleans (From "The Princess and the Frog"/Sing-Along)

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The Muffuletta: How This Gigantic New Orleans Sandwich Was Born | Good Gumbo

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10 Iconic New Orleans Dishes (And Where To Try Them)

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These are the ten dishes you must try on your next trip (or three) to New Orleans—including classics like beignets, muffuletta, and gumbo—and, more importantly, where to eat them.

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No other city in America keeps its history as vital and accessible as New Orleans. House after house, street after street, indeed entire neighborhoods, exude a rich sense of place, and serve as touchstones for fascinating history and complex culture. Look for it. In New Orleans, history can strut as loudly as a Carnival walking krewe, or creep as softly as a green lizard on a courtyard wall. Thrilling. Colorful. Tragic. Inspiring. Discover a little about the sweep of the city's history.

Colonial New Orleans

Indigenous people called it Balbancha, "land of many tongues," and they inhabited the rich delta lands between the Mississippi River ("Father of Waters") and Okwa-Ta ("Big Water," Lake Pontchartrain) for the same reasons that would later attract Europeans: abundant ecological resources and a convenient network of navigable rivers, bayous and bays. Claimed for the French Crown by explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1682, La Nouvelle-Orleans was founded by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in 1718 upon the slightly elevated banks of the Mississippi River approximately 95 miles above its mouth. Engineers laid out a grid of streets with a Place d'Armes (today's Jackson Square) that would become known as the Vieux Carré ("Old Square"), or today's French Quarter. The nascent outpost became the capital of the French Colony of Louisiana in 1723.

That same year, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, to keep it out of the hands of the British, victors of the recent French and Indian War. For the remainder of the 1700s, Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and Nueva Orleans functioned as an important trading and cultural partner with Cuba, Mexico, and beyond. It was during the Spanish colonial era that New Orleans transformed from a village-like environment of wooden houses to a city of sturdier brick buildings with urban infrastructure, largely due to the unpaid labor of enslaved people. Catalyzing the change were two disastrous fires, in 1788 and 1794, which together destroyed over a thousand old French buildings. New architectural codes were introduced shortly thereafter, resulting in splendid Spanish Colonial-style buildings such as the Cabildo fronting today's Jackson Square. Other Spanish contributions include wrought-iron balconies, patios (courtyards), above-ground cemeteries, and the city's earliest expansion, the Suburbio Santa Maria, today's Central Business District. The Spanish also liberalized policies governing slavery, which enabled the dramatic growth of a caste of free people of color

In 1800, the Spanish retroceded Louisiana back to France, only to have Napoleon sell the entire Louisiana colony, including New Orleans, to the United States as part of the $15 million Louisiana Purchase, finalized on December 20, 1803.

Although no longer a French colony, residents in the new American city of New Orleans held tight to their Francophile ways, including language, religion, customs, a complex social strata, and a penchant for the epicurean. The Creoles-that is, the locally born descendants of early inhabitants, many with French blood-created a sophisticated and cosmopolitan society that stood apart from nearly every other American city. From the streets of the French Quarter, to the Creole cottages of the Faubourg Marigny, to the Old Ursuline Convent and the former Charity Hospital, vestiges of French colonial times persist to this day.

Beset by Pirates and Privateers

The flow of goods between the Gulf of Mexico and port of New Orleans attracted smugglers, privateers, and pirates, with Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre among the most infamous. Jean Lafitte was a fixer and rogue who played an instrumental role in aiding Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson and the Americans in their victory over the British during the Battle of New Orleans (1815) at Chalmette. Tradition holds that Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, at 941 Bourbon Street, served as the pirates' base. Probably dating to the 1770s and said to be the oldest structure housing a bar in the United States, Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop is a picturesque relic of colonial-era vernacular architecture, and still a popular saloon today.

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras was first recorded in the present-day United States in March 1699, as Iberville and Bienville sailed up the Mississippi River and made note of the midwinter feast in their journal as they camped at Point du Mardi Gras. After that, French colonists celebrated Mardi Gras in Mobile and, following its founding in 1718, in New Orleans, mostly in the form of public festivity and private costumed balls. Mardi Gras remained a raucous but generally informal affair until 1857, when a group of Anglo-Americans from Mobile formed the Mistick Krewe of Comus and introduced formal parades and elaborate floats organized by social organizations called krewes. The krewes of Comus and later Rex would set the template for Mardi Gras for decades to come, by which time New Orleanians proudly called their pre-Lenten feast "the greatest free show on Earth."

Antebellum New Orleans

In the mid-1800s, the highest concentration of millionaires in America could be found between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Their wealth came largely from sugar cane plantations, which depended on the labor of thousands of enslaved African Americans. In the 1850s alone, Louisiana plantations produced an estimated 450 million pounds of sugar per year, worth more than $20 million annually.

Sugar and cotton came downriver on steamboats en route to global markets. Thousands of dockworkers toiled on the wharves of New Orleans to transfer the cargo to ocean-going ships after unloading their imports, while hundreds of bankers, merchants, factors, insurers, and lawyers managed finance and logistics. Millions were made in the commerce, and much of it went to the powerful aristocracy. That wealth may be seen to this day in the opulent townhouses of the French Quarter and the magnificent mansions of the Garden District. But that elegance could not mask the fact that this was an enslaved society, as well as the nation's busiest slave marketplace, throughout the antebellum era, 1803-1861.

In 1840, New Orleans ranked as the third-largest city in the nation, the largest in the South, and the fourth-busiest port in the world. It had a population of 102,193, of whom 58 percent were white, 23 percent were enslaved African Americans; and 19 percent were free people of color. Its two primary ethnicities, French-speaking Creoles and English-speaking Anglo-Americans competed for power and lived in largely separate sections, the Creoles in the French Quarter and the lower faubourgs, the Anglo-Americans in what is now the Central Business District, Lower Garden District, and Garden District. All neighborhoods occupied the narrow crescent-shaped natural levee abutting the Mississippi River, behind which was an uninhabitable swamp. River floods, hurricanes, and fires were constant threats, as were devastating epidemics of yellow fever, dengue, malaria and cholera.

The Civil War and Reconstruction

Union troops captured Confederate New Orleans in May 1862 and occupied the region for the remainder of the Civil War. Afterward, a racially integrated Reconstruction-era government passed a progressive state constitution and sought to establish civil rights for emancipated slaves. But after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white-supremacist forces steadily regained control, and racial subjugation and segregation would ensue for a century to come. The 1896 Supreme Court decision on Plessy versus Ferguson, which legally sanctioned "separate but equal" policies, derived from a local case.

While New Orleans would never regain its domination of western trade, the Crescent City in postbellum times did catch up on railroad construction, port modernization, levee-building, and urban improvements. The city made bold infrastructural advancements during the Progressive Era in municipal drainage, water treatment, sewerage, sanitation, public health, and urban beautification. Locals also pioneered the preservation movement, starting with the French Quarter, even as auto-friendly neighborhoods were laid out in recently drained swamplands, and the urban footprint of the modernizing metropolis reached to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

Victorian New Orleans and the Dawn of Jazz

You can still hear it and smell it: the rustle of skirts across heart-of-pine floors; a Ragtime tune tinkling from an open Treme window; a whiff of cheroot smoke; iced oysters and lager beer from a Magazine Street saloon. Discover Victorian New Orleans, the late 1800s, when the city gained traction, when arts and performance flourished, and when ornate gingerbread-adorned houses went up by the thousands. The Fairgrounds (1872), Audubon Park (1886), New Orleans Museum of Art (1911) and many other of the city's great offerings came into being in this era.

The late Victorian period also saw the emergence of jazz, a revolutionary new musical idiom that would become New Orleans' greatest cultural contribution to the nation and world. Music has always been a birthright in New Orleans; even before jazz, diverse ethnic and racial groups- French, Spanish, African, Italian, Latin, German, Anglo, Irish-found common ground in making music, and to this day, the city makes outsized contributions in various musical genres, including rap, hip-hop, bounce, and funk.

The Jazz Age in New Orleans also saw the rise of a literary and artistic community. The "French Quarter Renaissance" involved figures such as writers William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, artists Ellsworth Woodward and Caroline Wogan Durieux, and famed playwright Tennessee Williams, who took inspiration from the "rattletrap streetcar" that ran down Bourbon and up Royal Street as he penned his 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire.

World War II

New Orleans played a critical role in the epic struggle of World War II. Local shipbuilder Andrew Higgins, who had designed special vessels to navigate shallow Louisiana bayous, realized they would serve to well to deliver soldiers and materiel onto shallow beaches while avoiding deep-water harbors in enemy hands.

Built in local shipyards by a racially integrated workforce of men and women, "Higgins Boats" were used on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and throughout the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. They were so successful that General Dwight D. Eisenhower would describe Higgins as "the man who won the war for us." The story of New Orleans' heroic role in the war is featured in New Orleans' world-class National WWII Museum.

A continuum of change marks New Orleans' post-WWII experience. New bridges and highways were built to access expanding suburbs; a new city government complex opened in downtown, and modern skyscrapers broke the city's formerly modest skyline.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement brought dignity and new opportunities to Black New Orleanians. But, as elsewhere, resistance to school integration, white flight, and a reduced tax base left some inner-city neighborhoods impoverished and divested.

The oil bust of the early 1980s, coinciding with the mechanization of port activity and the decline of well-paying shipping jobs, led to a regional recessional and population exodus. By the late 1990s, however, an increasingly robust tourism sector and a more diversified economy helped mitigate the losses, though they fell short of returning the metropolis to its earlier economic position.

Hurricane Katrina

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina landed east of New Orleans, driving a storm surge into manmade canals and breaching federal levees and floodwalls in numerous locations. Eighty percent of the urbanized East Bank flooded, tens of thousands of people were trapped in the deluge for days, and over 1500 people would eventually perish. Many evacuees never returned, and some neighborhoods, particularly the Lower Ninth Ward, endure today with significantly reduced populations.

While recovery proved slow and contentious at first, sheer grit got most New Orleanians through the crisis and yielded something of a renaissance of civil spirit and cultural pride. A highlight of the post-Katrina era came on February 7, 2010, when the city's beloved New Orleans Saints won the team's first-ever Super Bowl. Cheers were heard 'round the world, and the sustained revival of spirit helped attract well-educated young people to be part of this epic story, transforming the Crescent City once again.

New Orleans remains a city of rich culture, proud people, and historic neighborhoods that have survived and thrived against odds. New Orleanians have always held tight to their unique culture, exuding pride of place and relishing music, cuisine, and festivity. Tourists from around the world can't stay away. We're glad you're here as we embark on our fourth century since Bienville commenced this bold experiment on the banks of the Mississippi, over three hundred years ago.

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New Orleans History - New Orleans & Company

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Delve into the fascinating history of New Orleans with New Orleans & Company as your trusted resource. Uncover the city's vibrant past!

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New Orleans history goes back beyond the founding of the city over 300 years ago and contains a whole world of subjects, movements, people, and periods, encompassing colonial history, diasporic history, United States history, arts and culture, technology, war, and so much more. For even longtime lovers and students of the city, it's a lot to learn. Here at The Historic New Orleans Collection, we never stop looking for stories from our past, and through our publications, programs, and exhibitions-and the First Draft blog-we've built a small library's worth of resources in the form of essays, oral histories, virtual exhibitions, and other online resources. To help introduce readers to New Orleans history writ large, while linking to fuller stories and resources on our website, THNOC's Visitor Services department compiled this primer-call it New Orleans History 101.

Native Americans

When the French founded the city of New Orleans in 1718, they did so at a site that had been used for centuries by Native Americans as a gathering place for trading, forming alliances, and hunting-today's French Quarter. The Choctaw named the area "Bulbancha," meaning Land of Many Tongues, signifying the multi-tribal nature of this location. The land itself was situated on higher ground-information that the French might have learned from Native allies in Mobile-due to middens created by discarded oyster shells and sediment deposits. These conditions, along with convenient access to Lake Pontchartrain through the Bayou St. John portage, made Bulbancha an attractive location for settlement. Despite the devastating effects of European colonization, descendants of the people who once gathered at Bulbancha during the pre-colonial era are still here. The Jena Band of Choctaw, Tunica-Biloxi, Coushatta, and Chitimacha are all federally recognized tribes. Although state-recognized since 1977, the Houma still struggle to achieve federal designation.

Colonial Architecture

New Orleans was a planned town, designed by French military engineer Le Blond de la Tour in 1721, and the original grid can be seen in today's French Quarter. Within a few years, settlers and enslaved Africans constructed permanent housing using native cypress. Elevated off the ground, the earliest French colonial houses had pitched roofs, few windows, and no porches. The houses were spaced out, with gardens in between.

During the Spanish colonial period (1763-1803), two large fires destroyed 1,068 French colonial structures. The Spanish government enacted building codes in 1795 that restricted the use of timber for multi-story buildings, instead favoring bricks and plaster. As the city rebuilt from the fires, houses were constructed close together, often with shared walls and courtyards. These courtyard homes served as an ideal model for future construction in the French Quarter by addressing two basic problems: the need for increasing density due to a growing population and the sometimes uncomfortable subtropical climate.

Slavery

New Orleans was built on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Enslaved men, women, and children constructed the city's infrastructure, provided domestic labor, sold goods in the markets, and built many of the houses and buildings still seen today. Their cultural and spiritual traditions, skills, and knowledge fundamentally shaped all aspects of the city. The first enslaved Africans were brought to the city in 1719, a year after its founding. Around 6,000 people were forcibly removed from the West African coast, many from Senegambia, and brought to Louisiana during the French period. The Spanish imported a similarly sized group from the Benin and Congo regions in the 1780s. When New Orleans became an American city in 1803, enslaved Africans and their descendants made up over one-third of the population. By 1820, New Orleans was the center of the domestic slave trade, which forcibly moved over one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South by 1860.

Free People of Color

Free people of African descent appear in New Orleans records as early as 1722, just a few years after Bienville founded the city in 1718. During the French period, militia service and individual acts of manumission offered avenues to freedom, while the surrounding swamps sheltered enslaved residents who ran away. Under the Spanish, the population of free people of color expanded considerably. The Spanish law of coartación, or self-purchase, allowed enslaved individuals to buy their freedom. Voluntary manumission-especially of women and children-by enslavers also increased. Following the resettlement of over 3,000 free people of color from Haiti in the early American period, the population tripled. Over time, free people of color formed communities built on multigenerational freedom with strong ties to family and place. By 1860, New Orleans had the largest free Black population in the Deep South. Most free people of color were French-speaking, and many owned property. Free men and women of color were skilled artisans, entrepreneurs, teachers, poets, and activists during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Dr. Louis-Charles Roudanez was a prominent New Orleanian who founded two bilingual Black newspapers, L'Union and La Tribune de La Nouvelle Orleans, in the 1860s. These papers helped foster early civil rights movements in New Orleans. ( THNOC, gift of Mark Charles Roudané, 2017.0201.1)

Commerce and the River

After a four-month voyage from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the steamboat New Orleans arrived in its namesake city on January 12, 1812. This event-the first steamboat to navigate the Mississippi-marked a revolution in commerce and travel on the river, allowing for movement both down and upstream. Two-way steam-driven boat traffic on the river led to significant growth and prosperity for the city of New Orleans over the next 50 years.

Approximately 2,350 miles long from its source in Minnesota to where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River had been vital to colonial European and, later, American interests since Hernando de Soto set eyes on it in 1541. With the development of steam technology in the early 19th century, New Orleans became one of the largest ports in the world. The city handled trade from the Mississippi River Valley as well as the Eastern seaboard, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Immigration

New Orleans is best known for its Creole heritage-a mixture of Native American, French, West African, and Spanish cultures and people. But it is less known as a major point of entry for immigrant groups entering the United States. From 1809 to 1810, over 10,000 Saint-Domingue refugees from the Haitian Revolution settled in New Orleans, doubling its population. Between 1820 and 1860, over half a million people-including Irish, Germans, and Filipinos-landed in New Orleans. Many of these immigrants only passed through the city on their way to settle in other parts of the country. Yet tens of thousands of immigrants stayed. After the Civil War, Italians, Jews, Croatians, Chinese, and others added to the city's population. More recently, Vietnamese and Latin American immigrants have made new homes in New Orleans. Each generation of immigrants and their descendants has made a lasting impact on the city's economy and culture.

Urban Expansion and Subsidence

Today about half of New Orleans's geographical area sits below sea level. This sinking occurred over the last three centuries as the city grew beyond the French Quarter and into the surrounding swamps. The sinking process began with early colonists' efforts to use outflow ditches to move water out of the French Quarter and into the swamps behind the city. A population boom in the early 1800s, along with plantation land sales, motivated city planners to expand beyond the French Quarter, allowing New Orleanians to move upriver into the present-day Central Business District and Uptown and downriver into today's Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods. Yet it was not until the introduction of pumps in 1915 that the swampy areas toward Lake Pontchartrain could be drained. Draining allowed New Orleanians to develop areas like Broadmoor, Mid City, Gentilly, and the Lakefront, but it also caused the land to sink below sea level.

Cemeteries

New Orleans is famous for its cemeteries with their aboveground tombs. It is commonly reported that the tombs are above ground because of the city's high water table. This, however, is a myth. As the story goes, the entire city is below sea level, and any hole in the ground will fill with water, so anything buried underground will float to the surface. But coffins buried under six feet of soil will not simply float to the surface. New Orleans tombs are aboveground because that is how tombs were built in France and Spain. Cemeteries in Paris also feature multi-vault aboveground tombs, as well as iron crosses and other features common to tombs in New Orleans. In-ground tombs are actually quite common in the city-many built by Protestant and Jewish residents, who prefer this variety.

Po-Boys and the 1929 Streetcar Strike

The poor-boy sandwich, best known as a po-boy, is one of New Orleans's most iconic foods. The origins of the famous French bread sandwich can be traced back to the 1929 streetcar strike and Martin Brothers restaurant in the French Market. Before opening their restaurant, Benny and Clovis Martin worked as streetcar conductors. When the strike began in July 1929, many businesses publicly supported and encouraged the streetcar workers. Martin Brothers offered the strikers free food. In order to feed so many "poor boys," the restaurant worked closely with its bread supplier to mass produce a longer and wider loaf of French bread to make its roast beef sandwiches. While the strike lasted four months, the "poor-boy sandwich" continued to be popular. Today the poor-boy is one of New Orleans's most favorite foods, with many varieties to enjoy-from the iconic roast beef poor-boy to the more recent introduction of Vietnamese poor-boys, or bánh mì.

Civil Rights Movement

The modern civil rights movement brought about sweeping changes in the city, as Black New Orleanians, following a local tradition of activism that was over a century old, fought for and asserted their rights in education, equal access to businesses and public transportation, and political participation. Local Black youth played a significant role in the movement. In November 1960, four girls-Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost, and Ruby Bridges-desegregated New Orleans public schools. They faced harassment and threats to their safety from white New Orleanians. Young men and women in local chapters of CORE and the NAACP Youth Council led efforts to integrate businesses, protest unfair hiring practices, and register Black voters. CORE members risked their lives as Freedom Riders, traveling throughout the South to test compliance with a federal ruling that required integrated interstate travel. Today, organizations like the TEP Center continue to educate people about the history of civil rights in New Orleans, while addressing the ongoing issues of systemic racism.

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras is big business in 21st-century New Orleans, but the celebration of Carnival has a long history in the city. A rare account of Mardi Gras in the French colonial period comes from Marc-Antoine Caillot, a young Parisian clerk only a few months into his employment in the colony. In 1729, Caillot described spending the Sunday before Mardi Gras singing and dancing with friends. Having learned of a wedding reception being held the following night, he proposed forming a party of maskers to attend. Caillot dressed as a shepherdess in a white corset and skirt, complete with beauty marks on his face. Engaging two musicians to join them, 11 costumed and masked partiers arrived at the reception, their way lit by eight enslaved men carrying torches. The revelers danced the night away much to the delight of the hosts. Although much has changed over 300 years, New Orleans carries on the idea that Mardi Gras is a time of role reversal and frivolity open to anyone's participation.

All For One Records

Established on May 29, 1961, AFO (All For One) Records was the first Black-musician-owned record label in the United States. Saxophonist, composer, and producer Harold Battiste and trumpeter and musician union representative Melvin Lastie established AFO for Black musicians in New Orleans to record and collect royalties from their recordings. It also allowed local Black musicians to record without the influence of out-of-town record labels. Battiste gathered a dream team of musicians for the house band, including John Boudreaux (drums), Peter "Chuck" Badie (bass), Allen Toussaint (piano), Roy Montrell (guitar), Alvin "Red" Tyler (saxophone), Melvin Lastie (trumpet), and Battiste on saxophone. They recorded a hit with Barbara George's "I Know (You Don't Love Me Anymore)" in 1961. This success got the attention of outside companies, and George's contract was bought out. In 1963, AFO records went on a hiatus that lasted until the late 1980s or early 1990s. AFO still operates in some capacity today.

Saxophonist Harold Battiste founded the first Black-musician-owned record label in the United States. ( THNOC, 2008.0224.4)

Hurricane Katrina

One of the most significant events in recent New Orleans history occurred on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall approximately 60 miles south of New Orleans as a Category 3 storm. The subsequent storm surge created three major levee breaches within New Orleans, causing our city to fill up like a bowl. Floodwater submerged 80 percent of the city, and most major roads leading in and out of New Orleans were damaged. The Superdome and Convention Center-shelters for those who did not or could not evacuate-were inadequately equipped. Thousands were stranded on the interstate, hospital patients were evacuated by air, and prisoners were left to fend for themselves. The government's response to Katrina outraged New Orleans residents and people across the nation. Katrina became the catalyst for a myriad of long-term conversations on flood protection, poverty, evacuation procedures, displacement, systemic racism, cultural erasure, community policing, and historic preservation.

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New Orleans history starter pack: a beginner's guide to understanding

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New Orleans history goes back beyond the founding of the city over 300 years ago and contains a whole world of subjects, movements, people, and periods, encompassing colonial history, diasporic history, United States history, arts and culture, technology, war, and so much more. For even longtime lovers and students of the city, it's a lot to learn.

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Regions:
- Red:   Southwest
- Blue:   Midwest
- Yellow:  Southeast
- Green:  North East
- White:  Pacific
- Black:   Rocky Mountain

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Major Events and Festivals in New Orleans

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New Orleans is famous for everything from food to cocktails and our incredible live music scene. We also know how to celebrate. Whether it's Mardi Gras or the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the ESSENCE Festival of Culture in July, or major LGBTQ events like Pride and Southern Decadence, here is everything you need to know to plan your trip to one of the city's top signature events.

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Born of both hope and despair, the New Orleans soundtrack is as disparate as the history of its population, fueled by the influx of enslaved Africans to the waves of immigrants from places like Sicily, Ireland, Germany and, in more recent years, Mexico and Central America.

New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz, the city of Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Pete Fountain, Harry Connick, Jr. and the Marsalis family.

It's a place where gospel music achieves lofty heights and marching bands step, dip and sway down well-worn parade routes. It's a place where Mardi Gras Indians first inspired the call and response now associated with hip-hop, rap and bounce.

New Orleanians care deeply about family, faith, food, traditions, and, perhaps most of all, about making a joyful noise. Here we take our brassy expression of bliss to the streets in celebration of life, death and everything in between.

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New Orleans Music History and Traditions

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The New Orleans soundtrack is the product of many: Africa, Sicily, Ireland, Germany, Mexico & Central America. Click here to learn about the history of music in New Orleans.

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Celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans | National Geographic