New Orleans and the River

Publications and Presentations:

“The Cost of Complacency: How Americanization of New Orleans Proceeded Environmental Disaster and Federal Flood Control” | Panel: Hurricane Warning: Storms, Floods, and the Coast | The Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting | St. Pete Beach, FL | November 2025 (Forthcoming)

“Finally Federal: Infrastructure, Intervention, and the Mississippi River Commission in New Orleans” | The Southern Forum on Agricultural, Rural, and Environmental History 2025 | Dallas, TX | March 1, 2025

“Complacent to Chaos: The 1849 New Orleans Flood’s Impact on Flood Control in the Lower Mississippi Valley.” Southern Historian XLV (Spring 2024): 17–32.

“The Battle For the Batture: The First in a War Between Local, State, and Federal Levels of Government Over the Water of the Mississippi in New Orleans.” Panel: A River Runs Through It: New Orleans, Politics, and Race as Shaped by the Mississippi River. The Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting. Charlotte, NC. November 10, 2023

“New Orleans History Through Code and Mapping.” Public History Student Poster Show. ASU Humanities Week 2023. Tempe, AZ. October 19, 2023.

“Determining the Drain of the Land: Pre-Federal New Orleans Levee and Canal Management, 1718-1879.” Southern Historical Association Southern Exchanges. Online Event. July 22, 2021.

About the Project

This project, in progress for my Doctoral Dissertation at Arizona State University, examines the 18th—and 19th-century relationship between the people of New Orleans and water as a source of disease, destruction, and opportunity.

What’s Next?

After the dissertation and its conversion to a book is complete, I plan to revisit New Orleans as the backdrop to tell the history of the Batture.