Navigating the Ports of the Lower Mississippi Valley

Williams Research Center, 410 Chartes Street

Daniel Hammer, President & CEO, the Historic New Orleans Collection

Dr. Donald F. Boesch, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

Access of ocean-going vessels to ports along the lower Mississippi River has always posed challenges that required solutions including levees, channel training, jetties, and dredging. These solutions have benefited industry but have led to negative consequences for Louisiana’s wetlands-dominated deltaic ecosystem. Coastal land loss has been accelerated by these and other human activities such as flood protection, river-basin management, and energy extraction. Climate change is now an additional threat, affecting river flow, sea-level rise, and hurricane intensity. This talk will explore the future of the deltaic ecosystem as we work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which will affect oil and gas production and transport and maritime shipping in substantial ways.

Dr. Darryl Barthé, Lecturer of History and Visiting Researcher, Dartmouth College

Barthé offers a brief historical overview of the role of the Mississippi River in the political, social, and cultural development of Louisiana, from pre-Columbian contact to the 20th century. Whether connecting Indigenous tribal nations to far-flung relatives, French and Scottish fur traders from Ohio to the Gulf Coast, or Kentuckian river-men and the enslaved Africans whose labor they would steal and exploit to create vast fortunes, life in Louisiana has always been built up around the river.

Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street

Richard Campanella, Professor of Geography and Associate Dean for Research, Tulane School of Architecture

This illustrated lecture will analyze the maritime history and facility geography of the Port of New Orleans from the early 1700s through the 2020s. We will explore how French and Spanish vessels used a system of transfer stations to move between the Gulf and the Mississippi, and how New Orleans became, by antebellum times, the leading export city of the United States and one of the leading ports of the world. After its administration shifted from the city to the state, in 1896, the Port of New Orleans embarked on an aggressive modernization campaign that, in time, would entail intermodal transportation, value-added industry, seaway excavation, warehousing, containerization, and, perhaps more pertinent to the near future, geographical flexibility in the face of a globalized economy.

Enjoy lunch on your own, or take part in the optional add-on lunch at Antoine's Restaurant. Learn more below, under Add-on Activities.

Dr. Glenn A. Chambers, Professor of History and Interim Dean of the Honors College, Michigan State University

This presentation will trace the experiences of Caribbean and Central American immigrants to New Orleans during the first half of the 20th century. It will emphasize the ways in which these immigrants from multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies navigated the racial and political realities of New Orleans and found ways to integrate themselves into society, while retaining aspects of their cultures that later became part of the mainstream.

Emily Perkins, Curatorial Cataloger, the Historic New Orleans Collection

HNOC Curatorial Cataloger Emily Perkins will share items and collections at the Williams Research Center related to the history of immigration to New Orleans between the Louisiana Purchase and Hurricane Katrina. Within the contexts of US immigration history, yellow fever, and local history, Perkins will discuss the diversity of the city’s immigration history as well as the role of the port in voluntary and forced migration.

Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street

Dr. Thomas J. Adams, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and History, University of South Alabama

For most of its history, the Port of New Orleans was the city and region’s economic engine. It also lay at the heart of class conflict in the United States. In 1892—the same year as the Homestead Strike and at the high tide of the Populist revolt—Black and white workers joined in the largest general strike in the history of the American South. That strike and later violent battles on the port in the 1930s and ’40s remain emblematic of a time when “the labor question”—who works and under what social conditions—was meaningfully up for contestation. This talk places the New Orleans waterfront in the history and present of class conflict in the nation as a whole.

Representatives from the lower Mississippi River ports discuss their histories, operations, and collaboration.

Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street

Enjoy light refreshments and meet the speakers

This event is sold out.

1350 Port of New Orleans Place
Tours at 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m.
$85 (add to order at checkout)

Board the Port of New Orleans’s fireboat for a guided tour of facilities located on the Mississippi River. The tour, which will last 60 to 90 minutes, will proceed from the port’s administration building on the Mississippi River, first upriver to view its riverfront facilities and then downriver toward the French Quarter. Guests will learn about the current land uses of the port and cargo moving through it.

Antoine’s Restaurant
713 St. Louis Street
12:30 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
$125 (add to order at checkout)

Join symposium speakers and HNOC staff for a private lunch in the city’s oldest restaurant. Space is limited.