Richard Campanella - LINCOLN IN NEW ORLEANS: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History | Octavia Books | New Orleans, Louisiana

Start: 11/06/2010 6:00 pm

Please join us for an evening with Richard Campanella (author of Bienville's Dilemma and Geographies of New Orleans), who will discuss and sign his new book, LINCOLN IN NEW ORLEANS: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History.

In 1828, a teenaged Abraham Lincoln guided a flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The adventure marked his first visit to a major city and exposed him to the nation’s largest slave marketplace. That trip, and a second one in 1831, would form the two longest journeys of Lincoln’s life, his only visits to the Deep South, and his foremost experience in a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse urban environment.

"Lincoln in New Orleans" reconstructs, to levels of detail and analyses never before attempted, the nature of those two journeys and examines their influence on Lincoln’s life, presidency, and subsequent historiography. It also sheds light on river commerce and New Orleans in the antebellum era, because, as exceptional as Lincoln later came to be, he was entirely archetypal of the Western rivermen of his youth who traveled regularly between the “upcountry” and the Queen City of the South.

This is a Lincoln story, a Mississippi River story, a New Orleans story, and an American story.

Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, is the author of Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm, winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' Book of the Year Award; Time and Place in New Orleans, selected as the Gulf South Booksellers Association's Book of the Year; and the critically acclaimed photographic survey New Orleans Then and Now. His research has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of Architectural Education, Technology in Society, and Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, and cited by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and American Experience (PBS). Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Campanella is the associate director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research and a research professor with Tulane's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.