What can current day New Orleanians learn from John Blassigame's important study of Blacks in New Orleans 1860-1880? Attend this presentation to find out. Free and open to the public. Held at the beautiful Ashe' Powerhouse Theater and sponsored by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University (Nola Gulf South), Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, University of New Orleans, Amistad Research Center, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the OAH Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians, and Tulane's Africana Studies Department. Chair: V. P. Franklin, Journal of African American History Commentator: Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University Featuring: Free Women of Color in the Colonial Gulf South Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins University The Politics of Hurricane Katrina Leslie Harris, Northwestern University The Public History of New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade Erin Greenwald, The Historic New Orleans Collection About the panel: For generations of scholars, John Blassingame’s Black New Orleans: 1860–1880, (1973) was the entry point into the rich history of African Americans and Afro-Creoles in one of the most important cities in the antebellum United States. Blassingame recognized, as had W. E. B. DuBois in an earlier era, that the history of people of African descent in New Orleans was both crucial and too little understood within the broader context of American history. As we approach the city’s tricentennial, we take advantage of the Organization of American Historians' meeting in New Orleans to revisit Blassingame’s legacy. This panel reflects the transformation in the scholarship since Black New Orleans appeared in 1973—in terms of who is producing that scholarship, the new questions these scholars are asking, and the ways they are taking their work beyond the academy to engage with the public.