New Orleans (commonly known as NOLA or The Big Easy, among other nicknames) is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 at the 2020 census, New Orleans is the most populous city in Louisiana, the second-most populous in the Deep South (after Atlanta), and the twelfth-most populous in the Southeastern United States; the New Orleans metropolitan area, with about 1 million residents, is the 59th-most populous metropolitan area in the United States. New Orleans serves as a major port and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region. The city is coextensive with Orleans Parish.
New Orleans is renowned for its distinctive music, Creole cuisine, unique dialects, and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street.
Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before becoming part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New Orleans in 1840 was the third most populous city in the United States, and it was the largest city in the American South from the Antebellum era until after World War II. The city has historically been very vulnerable to flooding, due to its high rainfall, low-lying elevation, poor natural drainage, and proximity to multiple bodies of water. State and federal authorities have installed a complex system of levees and drainage pumps in an effort to protect the city.
New Orleans was severely affected by Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005, which flooded more than 80% of the city, killed more than 1,300 people, and displaced thousands of residents, causing a population decline of over 50%. Since Katrina, major redevelopment efforts have led to a slight rebound in the city's population. Concerns have been expressed about gentrification and consequent displacement.
Etymology and nicknames
Before the arrival of European colonists, the indigenous Choctaw people called the area of present-day New Orleans Bulbancha, which translates as "land of many tongues". It appears to have been a contraction of balbáha a̱shah, which means "there are foreign speakers". In his book Histoire de la Louisiane, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz wrote that the indigenous name referred to the Mississippi River and that the use of the same name for the settlement relates to Native American concepts of the close interaction between rivers and their surrounding land.
The name of New Orleans derives from the original French name, La Nouvelle-Orléans, which was given to the city in honor of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who served as Louis XV's regent from 1715 to 1723. The French city of Orléans itself was originally known as civitas Aurelianorum, possibly named after one of the many Roman Emperors bearing the nomen gentilicum around that time, which later evolved into Orléans.
Following the defeat in the Seven Years' War, France formally transferred the possession of Louisiana to Spain, with which France had secretly signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau a year earlier, in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. The Spanish renamed the city Nueva Orleans (pronounced [ˌnweβa oɾleˈans]), which was used until 1800. The United States, which had acquired possession from France in 1803, anglicized the French name to New Orleans.
New Orleans has several nicknames, including these:
- Crescent City, alluding to the course of the Lower Mississippi River around and through the city.
- The Big Easy, possibly a reference by musicians in the early 20th century to the relative ease of finding work there.
- The City that Care Forgot, used since at least 1938, referring to the outwardly easygoing, carefree nature of the residents.
- NOLA, the acronym for New Orleans, Louisiana.
History
French–Spanish colonial era
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded in the spring of 1718 by the French Mississippi Company under Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land traditionally inhabited by the Chitimacha people. The city was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, then-regent of the Kingdom of France whose title derived from the French city of Orléans. As a colony, French Louisiana faced conflict with Native American tribes navigating rival European powers. In 1729, the Natchez revolt erupted with an attack on Fort Rosalie, resulting in the deaths of over 200 French colonists. Governor Étienne Perier launched a retaliatory campaign that effectively destroyed the Natchez people, but it soured relations between France and the territory's Native Americans leading directly into the Chickasaw Wars of the 1730s.
Native resistance continued into the 1740s under governor Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, as tribes including the Chickasaw and Choctaw leveraged competing colonial interests. Raids intensified as French economic instability weakened colonial defenses, with some Chickasaw attacks reaching as far south as Baton Rouge. Meanwhile, labor shortages led the French colonists to turn to the Atlantic slave trade. By the early 1720s, enslaved Africans were arriving in significant numbers, and in 1724, the Code Noir formalized harsh laws governing their lives. A distinct Afro-Creole culture began to develop, blending African traditions with Catholicism and French language, giving rise to practices such as Louisiana Voodoo and the Louisiana Creole language.
New Orleans quickly emerged as a cultural and commercial hub in French Louisiana. Its position as a key port made it the gateway for goods moving between the interior of North America and the Atlantic world. Institutions like the Ursuline sisters, founded in 1727 by nuns sponsored by the Company of the Indies, reflected the city's integration into French religious and educational networks. The convent educated girls and remains foundational to several modern schools in the city. Early city planning and architecture were shaped by military engineers like Pierre Le Blond de Tour and Adrien de Pauger, whose designs laid out the enduring street grid and fortifications. By the 1740s, public works programs under engineer Ignace François Broutin transformed the city's architecture, blending colonial governance with a distinct Creole character.
After France ceded Louisiana to the Spanish Empire in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, New Orleans residents resisted Spanish rule. Local residents staged the Louisiana Rebellion of 1768, briefly seizing control of the city and sending a delegation to France to appeal for renewed French authority. Their efforts failed, and King Louis XV reaffirmed Spanish sovereignty. Nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) dates from the Spanish period, notably excepting the Old Ursuline Convent. During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans played a key role as a supply hub for the American cause, particularly under Spanish governor Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez, who led a campaign against the British from the city in 1779. From the 1760s onward, Filipinos also began settling in the region.
United States territorial era
The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 restored French control of New Orleans and Louisiana, but Napoleon sold both to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles and Africans. Later immigrants were Irish, Germans, Poles and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on nearby large plantations.
Between 1791 and 1810, thousands of St. Dominican refugees from the Haitian Revolution, both whites and free people of color (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans; a number brought their slaves with them, many of whom were native Africans or of full-blood descent. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black people, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. In addition to bolstering the territory's French-speaking population, these refugees had a significant impact on the culture of Louisiana, including developing its sugar industry and cultural institutions.
As more refugees were allowed into the Territory of Orleans, St. Dominican refugees who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in 1809 as retaliation for Bonapartist schemes. Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color (of mixed-race European and African descent), and 3,226 slaves of primarily African descent, doubling the city's population. The city became 63 percent black, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent at that time.
Slave rebellion
On January 8–11, 1811, about 500 enslaved Africans in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes rose up in the German Coast rebellion against their enslavers, killing two white men in the process. They proceeded to march south toward New Orleans and were eventually controlled by the local militia, with numerous casualties on both sides.
The uprising has been called the "largest slave rebellion in US history."
Battle of New Orleans and antebellum period
During the final campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 in an attempt to capture New Orleans. Despite great challenges, General Andrew Jackson, with support from the U.S. Navy, successfully cobbled together a force of militia from Louisiana and Mississippi, U.S. Army regulars, a large contingent of Tennessee state militia, Kentucky frontiersmen and local privateers (the latter led by the pirate Jean Lafitte), to decisively defeat the British in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. The armies had not learned of the Treaty of Ghent, which had been signed on December 24, 1814 (although not ratified by the U.S. government until February 16, 1815). The fighting in Louisiana began in December 1814 and did not end until late January, after the Americans held off the Royal Navy during a ten-day siege of Fort St. Philip.
As a port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum period in the Atlantic slave trade. The port handled commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed along the Mississippi River watershed. The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. Despite its role in the slave trade, New Orleans at the time also had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated, middle-class property owners.
New Orleans housed the largest slave market in the country, particularly after the U.S. ended the international slave trade in 1808. The domestic trade surged, with two-thirds of more than a million enslaved people forcibly relocated to the Deep South. The trade's economic value was immense as slaves were collectively valued at half a billion dollars, and the broader economy surrounding the trade, including transport and services, generated billions more. As a result, New Orleans benefited significantly, both financially and commercially, from this system.
Following the Louisiana Purchase, Anglo-Americans and later German and Irish immigrants migrated to the city, contributing to its rapid growth. By 1840, New Orleans was the wealthiest and third-most populous city in the U.S. The white Francophone population remained influential, with French still used in some schools. Free people of color (gens de couleur libres), mostly of mixed race and largely Francophone, formed a distinct artisan and professional class, even as the majority of black residents remained enslaved. The city's prosperity was shadowed by repeated epidemics of yellow fever and other tropical and infectious diseases, which killed over 150,000 residents in the 19th century. By 1860, the city's population had reached nearly 170,000, its per capita income was the second highest in the nation, and it was the third-largest U.S. port by import tonnage.
Civil War–Reconstruction era
As the Creole elite feared, the American Civil War changed their world. In April 1862, following the city's occupation by the Union Navy after the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler – a respected Massachusetts lawyer serving in that state's militia – was appointed military governor. New Orleans residents supportive of the Confederacy nicknamed him "Beast" Butler, because of an order he issued. After his troops had been assaulted and harassed in the streets by women still loyal to the Confederate cause, his order warned that such future occurrences would result in his men treating such women as those "plying their avocation in the streets", implying that they would treat the women like prostitutes. Accounts of this spread widely. He also came to be called "Spoons" Butler because of the alleged looting that his troops did while occupying the city, during which time he himself supposedly pilfered silver flatware.