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Welcome to New Orleans! Louisiana
Rene Cavelier Sieur de la
Salle, a French explorer, was the first European to explore the lower
Mississippi River, and subsequently, he claimed the entire river and its
basin, a substantially larger plot than the modern state of Louisiana, for
France. The immense area was named in honor of King Louis XIV and his wife
Anne. Phillipe, Duc d'Orleans, then Regent of France, gave his name to New
Orleans, but it was Sieur d'Iberville who founded the actual city some 20
years later.
In the 1760s, New Orleans
underwent its first major social transformation with the arrival of two
new groups: the Acadians and the Spanish. The Acadian immigrants, or
Cajuns, who were ousted from their native Nova Scotia by the British,
traversed the entire United States, and settled in the bayous west of New
Orleans.
Once Louisiana was officially
named an American state, American settlers and Irish and Italian
immigrants rushed into the city of New Orleans. Rebuffed by the city's
Creole society, the Americans settled upriver from the Vieux Carre (French
Quarter) in what are now the Central Business District and the Irish
Channel. Skirmishes between the old and new residents occurred frequently.
The dividing line, an empty canal, between the French Quarter and the
American sector, became known as "the neutral ground" and then,
Canal Street.
In 1969, the first Jazz
Festival, a 10-day festival, one of the world's largest musical
celebrations, attracted the biggest names in jazz and blues to its outdoor
stages. The festival continues to draw impossibly large numbers of
visitors to the city each year.
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