My favorite magazine, The Week, has a fantastic short article about the history of the wonderfully weird city of New Orleans.
The flood of immigrants in the antebellum era—Irish and Germans added to the mix—contributed to a freewheeling, raucous blend of culture, language, religion, and cuisine that gave New Orleans renown as "the city that care forgot." By 1840, both blacks and whites began pouring into the streets every year to celebrate Mardi Gras. Wealthy white landowners took their mulatto mistresses to mixed-race "quadroon balls" (for people of one-quarter black ancestry) or "octaroon balls" (for those one-eighth black), adding to the city's reputation for glamour, tolerance, elegance, and wickedness. Life in the swamp remained hazardous: Another hurricane flooded the city in 1849, and mosquitoes caused 23 separate outbreaks of yellow fever, with an 1853 epidemic killing 8,000 people. But New Orleanians partied on, with even funerals having a festive, musical air. One observer said that residents possessed "a love of life that borders on defiance."
