The most recommended books about the Mississippi River

Gwendolyn Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana is still a foundational text when it comes to studying African people in the colonial lower Mississippi Valley. Her deep knowledge of the archives and skill in bringing the stories of enslaved Africans to live make this a wonderfully informative book. She draws deep connections between the places that Africans left and their forced new homes in Louisiana, while placing a special emphasis on how that culture turned into an African creole culture in the lower Mississippi Valley.

As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln built a flatboat and floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell the produce his family and neighbors had grown. This and a similar trip three years later were his only exposure to the Deep South. They immersed him in a culture of riverboat men that was archetypical of the era and included events that became part of the mythology surrounding him, an attack by runaway slaves that could have killed him, and his rescue of fellow boatman from drowning. Campanella is a university professor, tireless researcher, and excellent writer.

Life on the Mississippi is the autobiographical story of Mark Twain’s career as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s.

I first read this book when living in the French Quarter in the 1990s and could hear ship horns out on the river as I took in Twain’s fascinating, often silly and sarcastic narrative about his life and the river.

When describing New Orleans cemeteries, Twain writes, “Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it.”

When the deities dedicated to the history of the French and Indian War got together to recommend their own list of the best books on the war that made America, they made Francis Parkman’s multi-volume work required reading. And the good news is that even if they had not, it is worth diving into headfirst.

The French and Indian War is often overshadowed by the American and then French Revolutions that followed on its heels. Yet, neither of them would have ever happened without the completely lopsided British victory in the first. Parkman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, was among the first scholars to shed light on the immense impact wrought by the fight for control over North America in the 1750s. His work is massive as it digs into the very origins of both countries’ humble beginnings and rapid growth in the New World. But fear not! If his… show more.

I was inspired by Horn’s observation that many of the men and women doing today’s most consequential environmental work would not call themselves environmentalists. Debunking the pervasive myths that conservation innovators must be bicoastal, political activists, Horn profiles a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman—all stewards of the land offering creative ways to restore soils and protect wildlife.

George Milne writes the definitive history of the Natchez people and how their encounter with the French changed the power dynamics in the lower Mississippi Valley in the eighteenth century. Milne draws on research in French archives to show how French and Natchez built a fragile cultural understanding based on misinterpretation of social and cultural cues. This book is very good at elaborating on the complicated relationships that often turned on questions of race, dominance, and submissiveness in the lower Mississippi Valley. It specifically highlights the way in which the Natchez people became aware of the way the French viewed them as racially inferior and in turn defined their own people as distinct from Europeans and Africans.

This is another classic, chock full of archaeological descriptions, along with prints of early mounds and artifacts. It’s prime source material, with first-person accounts of those who first discovered and excavated the mounds. Originally published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848 it remains an important reference on the mounds, a veritable time capsule of maps, illustrations, and accounts of early explorers.

American settler Cy Bellman leaves his daughter Bess to search for giant monsters in a Kentucky swamp.

It’s a brilliant story of a man’s obsession. But it’s Bess who fascinates.  While others doubt Bellman’s sanity, Bess believes in him. Young and vulnerable, when danger strikes, she’s as fierce as the wilderness her father faces.

She’s left to grow up in the care of an indifferent aunt. When Bess is touched inappropriately by the librarian, the girl takes evasive action. When the yard hand almost rapes her, she fights back, then with a snap, regains her composure to deal with a shocking death.

Davies uses words economically and poetically: they leave me breathless. Though short, the book’s an epic.

Yellow fever, like many feared diseases, conjures up an image of faraway, steamy rain forests. At one time, yellow fever really was found there. But the disease—and the mosquito that carries it—didn't stay there. I was surprised to learn how prominent and feared yellow fever was in early Colonial America and that it persisted in the United States through the early 20th Century. Crosby provides background on the disease from Africa, its path to the Americas, and routine epidemics in New Orleans, but the book's primary focus is the account of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 that decimated Memphis, Tennessee, and other towns along the Mississippi River.  I liked this book for filling in the blanks in my awareness and understanding of this American plague. 

Mark Twain’s wit somehow manages to transcend time as he infuses this iconic character with the freshness of an innocent who is anything but.

The “road” in this story is the Mississippi River, and the method of transportation is a raft. The journey takes Huck on a transformational journey as he unlearns everything his society has taught him about good and bad and right and wrong. This uneducated boy begins to think for himself.

Once the plot resolves, Huck wants to escape being “sivilized” because he has learned it is anything but. He wants to “light out for the territory”, a metaphorical place that, although impossible as a realistic solution to his problems, still seems a place of freedom worth seeking out.