Louisiana

New Orleans flew the French flag, then the Spanish flag, then the French flag again before the United States bought the entire Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803 for $15 million. That deal doubled the size of the country overnight.

To this day, Louisiana is the only state divided into parishes instead of counties. It's also the only state whose legal system is based on French and Spanish civil law rather than English common law.

The Caddo, Chitimacha, and Choctaw peoples lived here for thousands of years before French explorers founded New Orleans in 1718. Waves of French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean people shaped a culture you won't find anywhere else in America.

That mix created Creole and Cajun traditions, new styles of cooking, and, around the turn of the 1900s, an entirely new kind of music called jazz.

Louisiana's wealth came at a terrible cost. New Orleans became the largest slave market in the country, and the work on sugar plantations was so brutal that more enslaved people died there than were born.

In 1811, hundreds of enslaved workers launched the largest slave revolt in American history before soldiers stopped them.

On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson led one of the most unlikely armies ever assembled. Frontiersmen, free Black soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and the pirate Jean Lafitte's smugglers defeated 8,000 British troops in about 30 minutes at the Battle of New Orleans.

The peace treaty ending the War of 1812 had been signed two weeks earlier, but no one in Louisiana knew yet.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans after the levees failed. More than 1,800 people died across the region, and the storm hit Black neighborhoods hardest.

Walk the French Quarter, where buildings from the 1700s still line the streets. Eat beignets at Café Du Monde, then catch live jazz on Frenchmen Street.

Visit the Whitney Plantation in Wallace to learn how enslaved people actually lived, and try a po'boy or a bowl of gumbo from almost anywhere.