New Orleans

New Orleans. Situated on the first high ground rising from the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is a culturally diverse, historically Roman Catholic city.Founded as the capital of France's Louisiana colony in 1718, the swampy, mosquito‐infested site remained a largely undeveloped economic liability when the French ceded it to Spain in 1762–1763. The “Crescent City” (named for its location on a bend in the Mississippi River) began to prosper as it attracted large numbers of American settlers. Spain retroceded the colony to France just prior to Napoleon's sale of the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803. Notable Colonial Era developments included the genesis of New Orleans's large community of free people of color.

A regional economic boom in cotton, land, and slaves fueled rapid antebellum growth in a city fragmented into largely American “uptown” and Creole “downtown” sectors. The arrival of thousands of Irish and German immigrants contributed to the city's unique cultural tapestry and the inviting blend of music, food, and festival that was represented by the appearance in 1857 of the first modern Mardi Gras “krewes” (companies of costumed paraders).

By 1860, with a population of 168,675, New Orleans was the largest city in the South and fifth largest in the United States. The Civil War and Reconstruction accelerated New Orleans's “Americanization,” as evidenced by the imposition of an uncompromising system of racial segregation that divided white from black. Remnants of the city's unusual origins could be found, however, in a Creole protest tradition that surfaced in Homer Plessy's unsuccessful legal assault on Jim Crow in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896.

Late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century New Orleans stagnated economically even as its African‐American musicians took the lead in demonstrating the city's cultural vitality by developing jazz. The new music, Storyville (the fabled red‐light district), the corrupt Louisiana lottery, and gambling combined to enhance the city's exotic and sensual reputation. “Reformers” battled “Ring” politicians until 1904, when Martin Behrman consolidated one of the urban South's rare political machines.

After World War II, suburbanization, changing racial demographics, and the civil rights movement dramatically reshaped the city. New bridges, highways, and swamp‐draining pumps permitted geographic expansion, with whites concentrated in a suburban collar around an increasingly black urban core. Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial, a prominent civil rights leader, became the city's first black mayor in 1978. The city's population dropped to 496,938 in 1990 and, despite its flirtation with gambling as a solution to long‐standing economic problems, New Orleans increasingly resembled other racially segmented, economically troubled American cities as the twentieth century ended.
See also African Americans; Cotton Industry; German Americans; Irish Americans; Louisiana Purchase; Roman Catholicism; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery.

Bibliography

Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, 1992.
Reid Mitchell , All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival, 1995.

Arnold R. Hirsch