About Louisiana

Louisiana was named by the French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France in 1682 and named it "La Louisiane" in honor of King Louis XIV of France. The name honored one of the most powerful monarchs in European history, whose reign from 1643 to 1715 made France the dominant power on the continent. French colonizers established New Orleans in 1718, which became the capital of the territory and a major port city. France transferred Louisiana to Spain in 1762, Spain returned it to France in 1800, and Napoleon sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, doubling the size of the young republic.

Louisiana is unlike any other state in America. Its legal system is based on French and Spanish civil law rather than English common law. Its territory is divided into parishes, not counties. Its largest city, New Orleans, was built below sea level on a swamp at the mouth of the continent's greatest river. And its culture, a centuries-old fusion of French, Spanish, African, Native American, and Caribbean influences, produced jazz music, Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras, and an architectural heritage found nowhere else in the United States.

The state's geography is equally distinctive. Louisiana sits where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the most productive coastal ecosystems in the world, and one of the most vulnerable. The state is losing its coastline to the Gulf at a rate that makes it a front line of the global climate crisis. Entire communities have been swallowed by the sea. The land itself is sinking even as the water rises.

Politically, Louisiana has shifted from a Democratic stronghold, defined by the populist legacy of Huey Long , to one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation. But its politics have always been colorful, personal, and unpredictable, shaped by the same cultural complexity that defines everything else here.