New Orleans

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded the settlement on a crescent bend of the Mississippi in 1718 and named it La Nouvelle-Orléans in honor of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was regent of France for the boy-king Louis XV. Bienville chose a location ninety miles from the Gulf that local Chitimacha people called Bulbancha, a place of many tongues. The French wanted a port that would command the mouth of the Mississippi and therefore the entire interior of North America.

The name reaches back past Philippe II to the French city of Orléans on the Loire, which was known in Roman times as Aurelianum, honoring Emperor Aurelian, who ruled from 270 to 275 AD and reunited a fragmented empire after the Crisis of the Third Century. When Bienville named his Louisiana outpost, he was pulling on a chain of nomenclature that ran from the Roman third century through a French duke's title. The city has carried Aurelian's name for over three hundred years without knowing it.

New Orleans changed hands repeatedly in its first century. France held it until 1762, Spain from 1763 to 1800, briefly France again under the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, then the United States after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Each regime left a layer in the architecture and the street grid, but the name held through all of them. The Spanish called it Nueva Orleans; the Americans kept the French spelling and their own English pronunciation.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 submerged eighty percent of the city and killed over 1,800 people. The question of whether to rebuild below sea level at the mouth of the Mississippi was answered, in the end, by the weight of accumulated identity. A Roman emperor, a French regent, a jazz tradition, and a culinary vocabulary all share one address, and that address proved harder to abandon than the flood damage was to repair.