New Orleans, United States: Louisiana's 'big easy'

Slaves were not required to work on Sundays, when they would gather in ‘Congo Square’ – now part of Louis Armstrong Park – to trade, socialise and sing. Hence the black community of New Orleans – enslaved and free – retained a deep connection to African music and folkways forcefully repressed in other parts of North America.

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In 1763, New Orleans was ceded to the Spanish empire, and the blending of Spanish and French populations led to the creation of a specific Franco-Iberian Creole demographic. In 1788 and 1794, fires destroyed many of the city’s wooden buildings, which were replaced with much of the iconic architecture of the French Quarter. Examples include the Cabildo, the Spanish city hall built from 1795, and Pitot House, a 1799 plantation mansion. Carnival and the famous Mardi Gras parades were first celebrated in the 18th century; find out more at the Presbytère, part of Louisiana State Museum.

The city was given back to the French in 1800, but in 1803 Napoleon sold it to the rapidly expanding United States of America. What followed was a period of uneasy division as Anglo, Germanic and Dutch-descended Protestants from other states moved into a city dominated by a Franco-Iberian Catholic elite. Canal Street marked the divide between the city’s ‘American sector’ and Creole faubourgs (neighbourhoods).

New Orleans became the capital of the domestic slave trade and the busiest slave port in North America. Riverboats were designed to accommodate human chattel, and postcards were sold depicting slave markets. Louisiana threw in with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, but New Orleans was quickly captured by the Union navy. Though an integrated government and police force were established after the Civil War, these were forcefully ejected by white militias. Immigrants from Ireland and Italy then arrived, the former settling in what is now called the Irish Channel, the latter in areas such as the French Quarter.

New Orleans’ black community retained a deep connection to African music and folkways

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, musicians played tunes influenced by both classical composition and the African rhythms preserved in Congo Square: ‘jazz’. Explore its heritage at the New Orleans Jazz Museum housed in the Old US Mint, dating from 1835, and jazz funeral memorabilia at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Treme.

New neighbourhoods created by draining swampland were inundated by water in 1965 when canals and levees failed during Hurricane Betsy. Even so, the city’s reputation for good food, music and lively bars drew increasing numbers of tourists.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, flooding 80% of the city, rebuilding New Orleans became a national cause célèbre. Despite setbacks, the city marches on towards full recovery. The contribution of its inhabitants’ varied heritage is also increasingly recognised; public statues of Confederate generals were removed in 2017, the year in which LaToya Cantrell was elected as mayor – the first female African-American to hold that office in the city’s 300 eventful, turbulent years.

Adam Karlin is a journalist and travel guidebook writer. The latest edition of his Lonely Planet guide to New Orleans will be published in November

This article was first published in issue 10 edition of BBC World Histories Magazine, first published in June 2018