Louisiana Purchase

New Orleans is the birthplace of Jazz, a major US port city, important in river transshipment, naval logistics, and the illegal drug trade. New... Orleans is located at the mouth of the Mississipi River, just south of where the river splits off into Lake Pontchartrain, which forms the northern city limit and a unique ecosystem because of the salt water boundary. The Pontchartrain Causeway is the longest bridge in the world. New Orleans is unique in the United States for many reasons. It shares more in common with european cities and Montreal than most other American cities, and both historically and liguistically has more in common with other port cities like New York than other cities in the South . The architecture of the Vieux Carre, or French Quarter, mainly comes from the 18th century Spanish period, is reminiscent of many european cities, and changes are tightly controlled. The Garden District contains many stately mansions built in the early 19th century, after the city was purchased by the US. There are two distinct local cuisines, cajun and haute creole. Culturally and economically, since the decline of the local oil industry in the 1970's, the city and the attitude of local residents have more in common with a banana republic or a small caribbean nation than most US cities. Tourism is the major industry, and Mardi Gras is the major holiday.
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The French Republic , commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and... islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km , just behind that of the United States . Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world.
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Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the... United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a federal district to become the national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. It was formed from land along the Potomac River donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia; however, the Virginia portion was returned by Congress in 1846. A new capital city named after George Washington was founded in 1791 to the east of the preexisting port of Georgetown. Congress consolidated the City of Washington, Georgetown, and the remaining unincorporated area within the District under a single municipal government in 1871. The city shares its name with the U.S. state of Washington, located on the country's Pacific coast. Washington, D.C., had an estimated population of 617,996 in 2011. The city was the 24th most populous place in the United States as of 2010. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's population to over one million during the workweek.
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North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern... subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America, and to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean. North America covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers , about 4.8% of the planet's surface or about 16.5% of its land area. As of July 2008, its population was estimated at nearly 529 million people. It is the third-largest continent in area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth in population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Americas are usually accepted as having been named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci by the German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann.
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