Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Baton Rouge (/ˌbætən ˈruːʒ/ ^ⓘ BAT-ən ROOZH; French: Bâton-Rouge, pronounced [bɑtɔ̃ ʁuʒ] ^ⓘ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana. It had a population of 227,470 at the 2020 United States census, making it Louisiana's second-most populous city. It is the seat of Louisiana's most populous parish, East Baton Rouge Parish, and the center of Louisiana's second-largest metropolitan area, Greater Baton Rouge, which had 870,569 residents in 2020.

Located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the Baton Rouge area owes its historical importance to its strategic site upon the Istrouma Bluff, the first natural bluff upriver from the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. This allowed the development of a business quarter safe from seasonal flooding. In addition, it built a levee system stretching from the bluff southward to protect the riverfront and low-lying agricultural areas.

Baton Rouge has developed as a culturally rich center, settled by immigrants from European nations and African peoples brought to North America as slaves or indentured servants. It was ruled by seven different nations: the French, Spanish and British in the colonial era; briefly the Republic of West Florida; the United States as a territory and a state; the Confederate States of America; and the United States again since the end of the American Civil War. The city developed as a multicultural region practicing many religious traditions from Catholicism to Protestantism and Louisiana Voodoo.

Baton Rouge is a major industrial, petrochemical, medical, research, motion picture, and technology center of the Southern United States. It is the location of Louisiana State University, the LSU system's flagship university and the state's largest institution of higher education. It is also the location of Southern University, the flagship institution of the Southern University System—the nation's only historically black college system.

The Port of Greater Baton Rouge is the tenth-largest in the U.S. by tonnage shipped, and it is the farthest upstream Mississippi River port capable of handling Panamax ships. Major corporations participating in the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area's economy include Amazon, Lamar Advertising Company, BBQGuys, Marucci Sports, Piccadilly Restaurants, Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, ExxonMobil, Brown & Root, Shell, and Dow Chemical Company.

Human habitation in the Baton Rouge area has been dated to 12000–6500 BC, based on evidence found along the Mississippi, Comite, and Amite rivers. Earthwork mounds were built by hunter-gatherer societies in the Middle Archaic period, from roughly the fourth millennium BC. The speakers of the Proto-Muskogean language divided into its descendant languages by about 1000 BC; and a cultural boundary between either side of Mobile Bay and the Black Warrior River began to appear between about 1200 BC and 500 BC—a period called the Middle "Gulf Formational Stage". The Eastern Muskogean language began to diversify internally in the first half of the first millennium AD.

The early Muskogean societies were the bearers of the Mississippian culture, which formed around 800 AD and extended in a vast network across the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, with numerous chiefdoms in the Southeast, as well. By the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico in the early 16th century, by some evidence many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned. At the time, this region appeared to have been occupied by a collection of moderately sized native chiefdoms, interspersed with autonomous villages and tribal groups. Other evidence indicates these Mississippian settlements were thriving at the time of the first Spanish contact. Later Spanish expeditions encountered the remains of groups who had lost many people and been disrupted in the aftermath of infectious diseases, chronic among Europeans, unknowingly introduced by the first expedition.^{[citation needed]}

French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville led an exploration party up the Mississippi River in 1698. The explorers saw a red pole marking the boundary between the Houma and Bayagoula tribal hunting grounds. The French name le bâton rouge ("the red stick") is the translation of a native term rendered as Istrouma, possibly a corruption of the Choctaw iti humma ("red pole"); André-Joseph Pénicaut—a carpenter traveling with d'Iberville—published the first full-length account of the expedition in 1723. According to Pénicaut: