New Orleans Heritage Neighbourhoods

New Orleans is the American city with the most layered and least typical immigrant and colonial history. It was not settled from England, not shaped by Puritanism or Protestantism, not absorbed into the American mainstream until it had already developed a culture of its own. Founded by the French in 1718, governed by the Spanish from 1762, sold to the United States in 1803, and populated by waves of French, Irish, German, Caribbean, and African arrivals across the 18th and 19th centuries, New Orleans produced something that cannot be found anywhere else in North America.

These heritage guides cover three of the communities whose stories are most directly connected to Ireland, France, and the French Creole world: the Famine-era Irish of the Irish Channel, who dug the city's canals and built its levees; the French colonial founders of the Vieux Carré, whose language and culture shaped Louisiana into the 20th century; and the free Black Creoles of Tremé, whose French-speaking Catholic community built the first African-American neighbourhood in the United States and whose music became the foundation of American jazz.