American Experience presents a fascinating portrait of one of America's most distinctive and beloved cities.

American Experience presents "New Orleans , " a fascinating portrait of one of America's most distinctive and beloved cities. The small French settlement became the home of America's biggest party, Mardi Gras, and its most original art form, jazz. It has also been the site of explosive struggles with both integration and segregation and a proving ground for national ideas about race, class and equality. "New Orleans" airs Monday, Feb. 12 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET2 and Tuesday, Feb. 13 at 8/7 p.m. CT on KET1. Jeffrey Wright narrates.

The program tells the story of this remarkable city through interviews with New Orleans natives and scholars, as well as through rich archival photographic material and footage that was miraculously spared from the devastation wrought by Katrina. Vivid portraits of people now living in or returning to New Orleans bring the film up to the current moment.

From the very beginning, New Orleans has been, as an observer once called it, "a world in miniature." French-speaking Catholics and English-speaking Protestants, slaves and free people of color, Africans and people of mixed race, Albanians, Swedes, Germans, Irish and Italians--by the middle of the 19th century, all of them called New Orleans home. Some 100,000 people were crowded together on the narrow ribbon of high ground that shadows the Mississippi.

New Orleans' stunning cultural complexity would also spawn some of the most contentious and explosive struggles in the nation's history. In the aftermath of the Civil War, New Orleans was at once the most integrated city in the country and the site of some of the most vicious white supremacist violence. The program examines the city's role in the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson , which declared "separate but equal" constitutional, and the overturning of that decision in 1954. The court-ordered integration of public schools across the country a year later fueled a mass exodus of New Orleans' white population into the newly completed suburbs, sparking the downward spiral into urban blight that was tragically revealed by Katrina.

But even in the midst of conflict, the city has embraced creativity, the marriage of cultures and a diversity of opinions--and has served as home and inspiration for some of America's most famous creative forces, from Tennessee Williams to Louis Armstrong.

American Experience "New Orleans" is a produced by Insignia Films.