The Mississippi River lies at the heart of America: it is a life force, a home to towns and cities, a mode of transport and way for commerce throughout history. Join us to learn about the river’s past and how it transformed our country.

The Mississippi watershed spans almost half the United States; its running water are intertwined with the nation’s culture and history: Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired our first national literature; and jazz and blues were born in its floodplains and carried upstream. In this sweeping, landmark work of history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of this unruly river and Americans’ centuries-long efforts to make use of it—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. First, it was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect. Then, its floodplain’s rich soils lured European settlers and American pioneers, whose vision was to conquer the river. Since the time of Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist vision, our countrymen have transformed its landscape, most recently with engineering that has forever changed its natural life and passage. Following an illustrated presentation of images and insights from historians and conservationists alike, Upholt will be joined by author and essayist W. Ralph Eubanks. Their discussion of The Great River will illuminate what the river was and is—its power, purpose, and impact through time—from its source in northern Minnesota to where it meets the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.

Boyce Upholt is a journalist and essayist whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

W. Ralph Eubanks is faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. From 1995 to 2013, he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, he is the author of two previous books, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. His next book, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning, will be published in Fall 2025. Professor Eubanks divides his time between Washington, DC, and Oxford, MS.