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LA-019
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Louisiana is the only state that still divides its land into parishes rather than counties — a French Catholic inheritance that no legislature has ever seen fit to change.
Where the River Meets the World
The Mississippi Delta was home to the Caddo, Natchez, Chitimacha, Tunica, Atakapa, and dozens of other nations for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The Natchez people built temple mounds along the river; the Chitimacha wove the finest baskets in North America. Robert de La Salle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France in 1682, naming it Louisiana for King Louis XIV — a claim so vast it covered a third of the continent.
New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on a crescent bend of the Mississippi — a location engineers advised against and that flooded regularly, but that controlled access to the entire continental interior. France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762, Spain returned it to France in 1800, and Napoleon sold it to the United States in 1803. Through all these sovereignties, New Orleans absorbed French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, and eventually American cultures into a Creole identity unlike anything else in North America.
Louisiana entered the Union on April 30, 1812 as the eighteenth state — the first carved from the Louisiana Purchase. Its legal system was based on French and Spanish civil law rather than English common law, a distinction that survives in Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code today. The plantation system built on enslaved labor made the lower Mississippi one of the wealthiest regions in the antebellum world; New Orleans was the largest slave market in North America. Sugar and cotton made fortunes that built the Garden District mansions still standing today.
Reconstruction briefly produced Black political leadership unprecedented in the South — Louisiana had the first Black governor of any U.S. state, P.B.S. Pinchback, in 1872. But Reconstruction’s violent end produced decades of Jim Crow severity. Huey Long upended the old planter oligarchy in 1928, building roads, schools, and hospitals while governing as a populist strongman. His assassination in 1935 left a political style — colorful, corrupt, and surprisingly effective for the poor — that Louisiana politics has never fully abandoned.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, breaching the levees that protected New Orleans and flooding 80% of the city. Over 1,800 people died; hundreds of thousands were displaced. The recovery was uneven — wealthy neighborhoods came back faster, poorer ones were cleared and not rebuilt. Today Louisiana contends with some of the fastest land loss on earth: the coastal marshes that buffer the state from storms are disappearing at the rate of a football field every 100 minutes, a slow-motion catastrophe that threatens the very ground the state stands on.
1682
La Salle Claims Louisiana
René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle paddles to the mouth of the Mississippi and claims the entire watershed for France — roughly a third of the North American continent — naming it Louisiana for Louis XIV.
1718
New Orleans Founded
Bienville establishes New Orleans on a crescent bend of the Mississippi, ignoring engineers who warned the site was unbuildalbe. Within decades it controls the trade of a continent.
1762
Spanish Rule Begins
France secretly cedes Louisiana to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. The Spanish govern for 38 years, leaving their architecture in the French Quarter — the “French” Quarter is actually mostly Spanish Colonial.
1803
Louisiana Purchase
Napoleon, needing cash after Haiti’s revolution ended his New World dreams, sells Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. Jefferson doubles the size of the country overnight.
1812
Statehood
Louisiana enters the Union on April 30 as the eighteenth state — the first from the Louisiana Purchase territory, and the only one with a Napoleonic Code legal system.
1815
Battle of New Orleans
Andrew Jackson’s motley army of regulars, pirates, free Black soldiers, and frontier riflemen defeats a British invasion force at Chalmette. The war is already over — the news just hasn’t arrived yet.
1872
First Black Governor
P.B.S. Pinchback becomes acting governor of Louisiana — the first Black governor in U.S. history. He serves 35 days before Reconstruction’s enemies remove him.
1901
Spindletop Era Begins
Oil is discovered in the Louisiana-Texas border region; within a generation, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico makes Louisiana one of the nation’s top energy producers.
1928
Huey Long Elected Governor
Huey Long wins the governorship on a Share Our Wealth platform, builds roads, schools, and LSU’s medical school, and dominates Louisiana politics as a populist autocrat until his assassination in 1935.
2005
Hurricane Katrina
Katrina breaches New Orleans’s levees on August 29, flooding 80% of the city. Over 1,800 die. The storm reveals decades of deferred infrastructure investment and unequal recovery that define the city’s next twenty years.
