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NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - USA
New Orleans is the largest city in the state
of Louisiana, United States of America. By law and government, the city of
New Orleans and the parish of Orleans Parish are one and the same.
It is an industrial and distribution center, a major seaport, and known
for its rich cultural heritage, especially its music and cuisine. The city
is on the banks of the Mississippi River about 100 miles upriver from the
Gulf of Mexico at 30.07°N, 89.93°W.
As of the 2000 census, the population of the city is 484,674. This figure
does not include the suburbs in neighboring Jefferson Parish, Saint Bernard
and other nearby communities; the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan area is
estimated to have a population of about one million.
In addition to the urban areas of the city, New Orleans includes undeveloped
wetland, especially in the east. Some communities within the Orleans Parish
have historically had separate identities from the city New Orleans, such as
Irish Bayou. Algiers, Louisiana was a separate city through 1870. As soon as
Algiers became a part of New Orleans, the Orleans Parish ceased being
separate from the city of New Orleans.
New Orleans has a subtropical climate with mild winters and hot, humid
summers; it snows about twice a century. New Orleans is especially
vulnerable to hurricanes from June to November.
History
Colonial Era
New Orleans was founded by the French (as Nouvelle-Orléans) under the
direction of Jean Baptiste Lemoyne, Sieur de Bienville, in 1718. The site
was selected as a rare bit of naturally higher ground along the flood-prone
banks of the lower Mississippi, as well as being adjacent to a Native
American trading route and portage between the Mississippi and Lake
Pontchartrain via the Bayou St. John (formerly known to the natives as Bayou
Choupique). A community of French fur trappers and traders had existed along
the bayou (in what is now Mid-City New Orleans) for at least a decade before
the official founding of the city. Nouvelle Orleans became the capital of
French Louisiana in 1722, replacing Biloxi in that role.
In 1763 the colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire as a secret provision of
the Treaty of Fontainebleau, but no Spanish governor came to take control
until 1766. Some of the early French settlers were never quite happy with
Spanish rule, and repeatedly petitioned to be returned to French control. A
fire destroyed 856 buildings in the city on March 21, 1788, and another
destroyed 212 buildings in December of 1794; after this brick replaced wood
as the main building material.
The population of New Orleans also suffered from epidemics of yellow fever,
malaria, and smallpox, which would periodically return throughout the 19th
century until the successful supression of the city's final outbreak of
yellow fever in 1905. In 1795 Spain granted the United States "Right of
Deposit" in New Orleans, allowing Americans to use the city's port
facilities. Louisiana reverted to French control in 1801 after Napoleon's
conquest of Spain, but in 1803 Napoleon sold Louisiana (which at the time
also included the territory which are now several other states) to the
United States in the Louisiana Purchase. At this time the city of New
Orleans had a population of about 10,000 people.
19th Century
From early days it was noted for its cosmopolitan polyglot population and
mixture of cultures. The city grew rapidly, with influxes of Americans,
French and Creole French, many of the latter fleeing from the revolution in
Haiti. During the War of 1812 the British sent a force to try to conquer the
city, but they were defeated by forces led by Andrew Jackson some miles down
river from the city at Chalmette, Louisiana on January 8, 1815 (commonly
known as the Battle of New Orleans).
The population of the city doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, the city's
population was around 102,000, fourth largest in the U.S, the largest city
away from the Atlantic seaboard, as well as the largest in the South.
The importance of New Orleans as a commercial center was reinforced when the
Federal Government established a branch mint there in 1838, along with two
other Southern branch mints at Charlotte, North Carolina and Dahlonega,
Georgia. Such action was deemed necessary largely 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. In contrast to the other
two Southern branch mints, which only minted gold coinage, the New Orleans
Mint produced both gold and silver coinage, which perhaps marked it as the
most important branch mint in the country. The mint produced coins from 1838
until 1861, when Confederate forces occupied the building and used it
briefly as their own coinage facility until it was recaptured by Union
forces the following year. The mint machinery was evidently damaged during
the war, but because of its importance, unlike the mints at Charlotte and
Dahlonega, it was refurbished and put back into service in 1879, minting
mainly silver coinage, including the famed Morgan silver dollar from 1879 to
1904. The New Orleans mint, whose coins can be identified by the "O"
mintmark found primarily on the reverse of its coinage, earned a reputation
for producing coins of a mediocre quality; their luster is usually not as
brilliant as those of other mints, and center areas tend to be flattened and
not sharply struck. As a result, today well-struck New Orleanian coinage is
prized in the numismatic world. Despite its years of faithful service, in
1909 the mint was decommissioned and its machinery was transferred to the
main U.S. Mint facility in Philadelphia, a sad event which stuck in the
minds of Louisianans: twenty years later Governor Huey Long would rail
against this loss when he ran for the office of U.S. Senator against
incumbent Joseph Ransdell, who Long claimed had allowed this ignominious
closing of the mint to occur. The building, constructed in the Neoclassical
style like most 19th-century public buildings in the U.S. at the time,
functions today at the north end of the French Quarter as a museum of both
the minting activity and jazz music that has made New Orleans famous.
New Orleans was the capital of the state of Louisiana until 1849, then again
from 1865 to 1880. As a principal port it had a leading role in the slave
trade, while at the same time having North America's largest community of
free persons of color. Early in the American Civil War it was captured by
the Union without a battle, and hence was spared the destruction suffered by
many other cities of the American South. It retains a historical flavor with
a wealth of 19th century structures far beyond the early colonial city
boundaries of the French Quarter. The city hosted the 1884 World's Fair,
called the World Cotton Centennial. An important attraction in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries was the famous red light district called Storyville .
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