New Orleans is a city in southeastern Louisiana, on the Mississippi River, north of its entrance into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans is the seat of, and coextensive with, Orleans Parish. Long known for its exceptional and vivid cultural blend, the city currently is a leading commercial and tourism center for the South and the busiest ports inside the United States. The city covers a land area of 467.7 sq km (180.6 sq mi).
New Orleans lies largely below sea level. Since the city experiences high yearly rainfall, a technique of levees has been developed to guard towards flooding. These levees line the shores in the Mississippi as well as Lake Pontchartrain, which borders the city to the north. Furthermore, New Orleans contains a highly effective drainage program which could pump off vast amounts of liters of water per day.
The tiny villages of the Quinapisa and Tangipahoa peoples had been located in the vicinity of present-day New Orleans when the site was first visited by a European explorer, the Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, in 1682. The site was visited in 1699 by one more French explorer, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville. Recognizing the importance of the location, he developed a settlement there on 1718 soon after becoming governor with the Louisiana Territory. He named it Nouvelle-Orléans, for the duc d'Orléans, regent of France. Around 1722 the town was produced the capital in the French colony. Following the partition of Louisiana between England and Spain in 1763, New Orleans became the capital of Spanish Louisiana. A rebellion (1768-1769) against Spanish rule has been speedily suppressed. Throughout 1800 New Orleans was secretly ceded to France; in 1803 it was formally ceded to France after which, by the terms with the Louisiana Obtain, towards the United States.
New Orleans was incorporated as a city in 1805. In 1812 Louisiana became a U.S. state with New Orleans as its capital. The city was the state capital from 1812 to 1830 after which once again from 1831 to 1849. In 1815, at the close from the War of 1812, New Orleans was defended from a British attack by American forces led by General Andrew Jackson (later the seventh president of the United States) in a confrontation called the Battle of New Orleans. Among 1810 and 1850 steamboat site visitors on the Mississippi River made the city among the busiest ports in North America; by 1840 New Orleans was the fourth-largest city in the United States. Through the American Civil War (1861-1865) the city was a significant port and military center for the Confederacy and was an early objective of Union troops. It was captured by a Union fleet in 1862 and remained a Union stronghold for the rest of the war. Right after the war, shipping activities declined, but by the finish of Globe War I (1914-1918) they had started to increase again.
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