New Orleans is the most populated city in the state of Louisiana. The American Southern city is nicknamed “The Big Easy.” New Orleans is located in southeastern Louisiana, along side the Mississippi River.

History
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded on May 7, 1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named after Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time.

In 1803 Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Shortly after, the city grew exponentially with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles, Irish, Germans and Africans. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on large plantations outside the city.

As a principal port during the antebellum era, New Orleans played a major role in the Atlantic slave trade. The river in front of the city was occupied with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. Despite its dealings with the slave trade, New Orleans simultaneously had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated and middle-class property owners.

The Union captured New Orleans early in the American Civil War, spared the city the destruction many other cities of the American South saw.

Architecture
The New Orleans Visitor's Bureau describes the city's architecture, “New Orleans, with its richly mottled old buildings, its sly, sophisticated sometimes almost disreputable air and its Hispanic-Gallic traditions, has more the flavor of an old European capital than an American city.” It continues, “Townhouses in the French Quarter, with their courtyards and carriageways, are thought by some scholars to be related on a small scale to certain Parisian “hotels” – princely urban residences of the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Entertainment
New Orleans is home to numerous celebrations, the most popular of which is Carnival, otherwise known as Mardi Gras. Carnival officially begins on the Feast of the Epiphany, or the "Twelfth Night." Mardi Gras (French for "Fat Tuesday"), the final and exhaustive day of festivities, is the last Tuesday before the Catholic liturgical season of Lent, which ends on Ash Wednesday.

Hurricane Katrina
When Hurricane Katrina approached the city at the end of August 2005, most residents had evacuated. As the hurricane stormed through the Gulf Coast region, the city's federal flood protection system failed, resulting in the worst civil engineering disaster in American history. Tens of thousands of residents who had remained in the city were rescued or otherwise made their way to shelters of last resort such as the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans Morial Convention Center. Over 1,500 people died in Louisiana and some are still unaccounted for.