Search results for ""Louisiana State University Press""

After D-Day is one of a small but growing body of works that examine the Allied liberators of France. This study focuses on both the French experience of the U.S. Army and the American soldiers' reaction to the French during the liberation and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on French and American archival materials, as well as dozens of memoirs, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Robert Lynn Fuller follows French and American interactions, starting in the skies over France in 1942 and ending with the liberation of Alsace in 1945. Fuller pays special attention to French life in the war zones, where living under constant shelling offered a miserable experience for those forced to endure it. The French stoically withstood those travails-sometimes inflicted by the Americans-when they saw their sacrifices as the price of liberation and victory over Germany. As Fuller shows, when the French did not believe afflictions brought by the Americans advanced the cause of success, their tolerance waned, sometimes dramatically. Fuller maintains that the Allied bombing of France was an important yet often overlooked chapter of World War II, one that inflicted more death and destruction than the ground war still to come. Yet the ground campaign, which began with the Allied invasion of Normandy, unleashed enormous violence that killed, injured, or rendered homeless tens of thousands of French civilians. Fuller examines French and American records of the fate of civilians in the principal battle zones, Normandy and Lorraine, as well as in overlooked liberated regions, such as Orl?®anais and Champagne, that largely escaped widespread damage and casualties. Despite French gratitude toward the Americans for the liberation of their country, relations began to cool in the fall and winter of 1944 as progress on the battlefield slowed and then appeared to reverse with the German offensive in the Ardennes. Revealing in stark detail the experiences of French civilians with the American military, After D-Day presents a compelling coda to our understanding of the Allied conquest of German-occupied France.

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Gregory S. Taylor's Central Prison: A History of North Carolina's State Penitentiary is the first scholarly study to explore the prison's entire history, from its origins in the 1870s to its status in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Taylor addresses numerous features of the state's vast prison system, including chain gangs, convict leasing, executions, and the nearby Women's Prison, to describe better the vagaries of living behind bars in the state's largest penitentiary. He incorporates vital elements of the state's history into his analysis to draw clear parallels between the changes occurring in free society and those affecting Central Prison. Throughout, Taylor illustrates that the prison, like the state itself, struggled with issues of race, gender, sectionalism, political infighting, finances, and progressive reform. Finally, Taylor also explores the evolution of penal reform, focusing on the politicians who set prison policy, the officials who administered it, and the untold number of African American inmates who endured incarceration in a state notorious for racial strife and injustice. Central Prison approaches the development of the penal system in North Carolina from a myriad of perspectives, offering a range of insights into the workings of the state penitentiary. It will appeal not only to scholars of criminal justice but also to historians searching for new ways to understand the history of the Tar Heel State and general readers wanting to know more about one of North Carolina's most influential-and infamous-institutions.

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This Tilted World Is Where I Live gathers one hundred poems by Henry Taylor, drawing on over fifty years of published work by this witty, adept, and vital literary voice. Seventy-five poems appear from his previous books, spanning from The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) through The Flying Change (1985), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, to his latest volume, Crooked Run (2006). The book opens with twenty-five recent poems collected for the first time.From the beginning, Taylor has worked in both traditional and more open forms, avoiding rigid allegiance to either mode as he has responded to the world around him, from the horse farm in Virginia where he grew up, to the deserts around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and his wife Mooshe have lived for the past several years. In tones and moods ranging between grief and explosive hilarity, these poems confront a consistent set of themes. Taylor has long been drawn to considerations of what we mean by loving one another, how violence can intrude without warning into innocent lives, and how the things we have always seen can change with the passage of time. Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote that he ""is a truly important poet. Familiar and strange."" This Tilted World Is Where I Live offers an invaluable encapsulation of Taylor's knack for crafting poems that are not only fun but also instructive in the art of paying attention- of which he is a master.

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Drawing on over fifty years of research and study, archaeologist Jon L. Gibson comes to well-founded yet bold conclusions about the Archaic mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the peoples who made them. Examining topics ranging from the architectural incorporation of cosmic cycles and standard measures to traditional native myths and magical beliefs, Archaic Earthworks of the Lower Mississippi Valley is the definitive study of the history and ethos of a much-debated era.

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Challenges prevailing ways of thinking about the impact of the Civil War on the American South. Above all, Gaines Foster's work encourages Americans to confront the new divisions within their society even as they wrestle with old national - not just southern - failings.

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dark // thing is a multifaceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued. This work, full as it is of slashes of all kinds, ultimately separates darkness from thingness, affirming and celebrating humanity.

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For over four decades, John Coykendall's passion has been preserving the farm heritage of a small community in rural southeastern Louisiana. A Tennessee native and longtime master gardener at Blackberry Farm, Coykendall has become a celebrity in a growing movement that places a premium on farm-to-table cuisine with locally sourced, organic, and heirloom foods and flavors. While his work takes him around the world searching for seeds and the cultural knowledge of how to grow them, what inspires him most is his annual pilgrimage to Louisiana. Drawn to the Washington Parish area as a college student, Coykendall forged long-lasting friendships with local farmers and gardeners. Over the decades, he has recorded oral histories, recipes, tall tales, agricultural knowledge, and wisdom from generations past in more than eighty illustrated and handwritten journals. At the same time, he has unearthed and safeguarded rare varieties of food crops once grown in the area, then handed them back to the community. In Preserving Our Roots: My Journey to Save Seeds and Stories, Coykendall shares a wealth of materials collected in his journals, ensuring they are passed on to future generations. organised by season, the book offers a narrative chronicle of Coykendall's visits to Washington Parish since 1973. He highlights staple crops, agricultural practices, and favourite recipes from the families and friends who have hosted him. Accompanied by a rich selection of drawings, journal pages, and photographs, along with over forty recipes, Preserving Our Roots chronicles Coykendall's passion for recording foods and narratives that capture the rhythms of daily life on farms, in kitchens, and across generations.

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More Than This, like David Kirby's previous acclaimed collections, is shot through with the roadhouse fervor of early rock 'n' roll. Yet these rollicking poems also contain an oceanic feeling more akin to the great symphonies of Europe than the two-minute singles of Little Richard and other rock pioneers, as Kirby seeks to startle, to please, to unwind the knots that we get ourselves into and make it possible to being anew. Little goes unnoticed in these poems: death is present, along with love, friendship, food, religious ardor and philosophical skepticism, nights on the town and quiet evenings at home. With More Than This, his twelfth collection, Kirby takes readers back in time and out in space, offering quiet wisdom and a sense of the endless possibilities that art and life give us all.

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White, black, and Native American women in the early South often viewed motherhood as a composite of roles, ranging from teacher and nurse to farmer and politician. Within a multicultural landscape, mothers drew advice and consolation from female networks, broader intellec-tual currents, and an understanding of their own multifaceted identities to devise their own standards for child rearing. In this way, by con-structing, interpreting, and defending their roles as parents, women in the South maintained a certain degree of control over their own and their children's lives. Focusing on Virginia and the Carolinas from 1750 to 1835, Katy Simpson Smith's widely praised study examines these maternal practices to reveal the ways in which diverse groups of women struggled to create empowered identities in the early South.We Have Raised All of You contributes to a wide variety of historical conversations by affirming the necessity of multicultural- not simply bi-racial- studies of the American South. Its equally weighted analysis of white, black, and Native American women sets it distinctly apart from other work. Smith shows that while women from different backgrounds shared similar experiences within the trajectory of motherhood, no universal model holds up under scrutiny. Most importantly, this book suggests that parenthood provided women with some power within their often-circumscribed lives. Alternately restricted, oppressed, belittled, and enslaved, women sought to embrace an identity that would give them some sense of self-respect and self-worth. The rich and varied roles that mothers inherited, Smith shows, afforded women this empowering identity.This paperback edition includes a new preface by Smith that examines the power of storytelling, and the ways in which we think and talk about the past. No one, she suggests, is better suited to tell our collective story than our mothers.

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Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker's sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection: an amateur hacker attempts to track down his vanished mentor; a math prodigy, the child of divorced parents, struggles with being torn between his two families; a composer takes a spontaneous trip to Nashville while mourning his husband's death and gets trapped on a hotel rooftop with a hipster; and a wayward philosopher accepts a job working for an industrial farming corporation. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person. Pairing the emotional pursuit of connection with multiple forms of communication, Baker weaves the languages of HTML, mathematics, mu-sical notations, and propositional logic into his storytelling in order to unveil nuances of experiences and emotions. This poignant formal invention articulates loneliness, grief, doubt, and comfort in ways that are inaccessible through traditional language alone.In both form and content, Baker captures the complexities of breaking and forming connections with other people, and the various lan-guages we use to navigate this inescapable human need, resulting in a moving exploration of interpersonal bonds.

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Over sixty years after his death, Wallace Stevens remains one of the major figures of American modernist poetry, celebrated for his masterful style, formal rigor, and aesthetic investigations of the natural, political, and metaphysical worlds. In Making the Poem, noted Stevens scholar George S. Lensing explores the poet's progress in the creation of his body of work, considering its development, composition, and reception.Drawing on little-known sources and nuanced readings of Stevens' texts, Lensing expands the customary view of the poet's creative approaches. This wide-ranging study extends from the origins and overlapping themes of well-known poems through the social and political backgrounds that marked Stevens' work to the prosodic and musical elements central to his style. Making the Poem features a dynamic new reading of the important early poem ""Sea Surface Full of Clouds""- viewing it alongside his wife Elsie's journal describing the sea voyage that inspired the poem- and an extensive, multiperspective treatment of the widely anthologized ""The Idea of Order at Key West,"" as well as a careful excavation of the poem ""Mozart, 1935"" in the context of the U.S. Great Depression. Lensing concludes with a discussion of the gradual (and sometimes reluctant) recognition Stevens' work received from poets and critics in Great Britain and Ireland. Stemming from decades of research and writing, Making the Poem: Stevens' Approaches presents a holistic view of his creative achievements and a wealth of new material for readers to draw upon in their future encounters with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

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Whether your garden consists of large raised beds or a few pots on the patio, Kathryn K. Fontenot's The Louisiana Urban Gardener offers easy guidelines and useful tools to jump-start and maintain small yet bountiful gardens.Beginning and sustaining a successful home garden in an urban environment can be a daunting prospect, but Fontenot eliminates the guesswork with tips on testing and preparing soil, guidelines on what to purchase from local garden centers, and basic techniques, schedules, and strategies to produce a thriving crop. From where to plant for the best juicy home-grown tomatoes to how to organically protect against pests to when to grow fragrant oregano and rosemary, this resource offers definitive answers and ensures that novices have all the expertise they need to enjoy Louisiana's year-round growing climate.The Louisiana Urban Gardener includes: Guidance on choosing the best location for your garden Tips on garden design for containers, raised beds, and in-ground gardens Advice for preparing the best soil for your garden Strategies for managing insects, disease, and weeds Season-by-season instruction on what to plant and when to harvest An appendix on Louisiana gardens to visit for inspiration Tending to pots of young peas, sharing a fresh summer watermelon with friends, or bringing extra beets and kale to coworkers on a winter day are just a few of the rewards of gardening. The Louisiana Urban Gardener gives everyone, from young professionals to retirees, the knowledge they need to enjoy all the pleasures of homegrown food.

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From the revelers on horseback in Eunice and Mamou to the miles-long New Orleans parade routes lined with eager spectators shouting ""Throw me something, mister!,"" no other Louisiana tradition celebrates the Pelican State's cultural heritage quite like Mardi Gras. In Carnival in Louisiana, Brian J. Costello offers Mardi Gras fans an insider's look at the customs associated with this popular holiday and travels across the state to explore each area's festivities.Costello brings together the stories behind the tradition, gleaned from his research and personal involvement in Carnival. His fascinating tour of the season's parades, balls, courirs, and other events held throughout Louisiana go beyond the well-known locales for Mardi Gras. Exploring the diverse cultural roots of state-wide celebrations, Costello includes festivities in Lafayette, Baton Rouge, New Roads, and Shreveport. From venerable floats to satirical parades, exclusive events to spontaneous street parties, Carnival in Louisiana is an indispensable guide for Mardi Gras attendees, both veteran Krewe members seeking to expand their horizons and first-time tourists hoping to experience of all sides of Louisiana's favorite season.

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Throughout the Civil War, irregular warfare, including the use of hit-and-run assaults, ambushes, and raiding tactics, thrived in localized guerrilla fights within the Border States and the Confederate South. The Guerrilla Hunters offers a comprehensive overview of the tactics, motives, and actors in these conflicts, from the Confederate-authorised Partisan Rangers, a military force directed to spy on, harass, and steal from Union forces, to men like John Gatewood, who deserted the Confederate army in favour of targeting Tennessee civilians believed to be in sympathy with the Union.With a foreword by Kenneth W. Noe and an afterword by Daniel E. Sutherland, this collection represents an impressive array of the foremost experts on guerrilla fighting in the Civil War. Providing new interpretations of this long-misconstrued aspect of warfare, these scholars go beyond the conventional battlefield to examine the stories of irregular combatants across all theaters of the Civil War, bringing geographic breadth to what is often treated as local and regional history. The Guerrilla Hunters shows that instances of unorthodox combat, once thought isolated and infrequent, were numerous, and many clashes defy easy categorisation. Novel methodological approaches and a staggering diversity of research and topics allow this volume to support multiple areas for debate and discovery within this growing field of Civil War scholarship.

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The successful realisation of diversity, resilience, usefulness, profitability, or beauty in landscape design requires a firm understanding of the stakeholders' values. This collection, which incorporates a wide variety of geographic locations and cultural perspectives, reinforces the necessity for clear and articulate comprehension of the many factors that guide the design process.As the contributors to this collection reveal, dominant and emerging social, political, philosophical, and economic concerns perpetually assert themselves in designed landscapes, from manifestations of class consciousness in Napa Valley vineyards to recurring themes and conflicts in American commemorative culture as seen in designs for national memorials. One essay demonstrates the lasting impact of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on the culture and spaces of the Midwest, while another considers the shifting historical narratives that led to the de-domestication and subsequent re-wilding of the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. These eleven essays help foster the ability to conduct a balanced analysis of various value systems and produce a lucid visualization of the necessary tradeoffs. Offering an array of case studies and theoretical arguments, Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design encourages professionals and educators to bring self-awareness, precision, and accountability to their consideration of landscape designs.

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In the inter war era, the rise of the largest political movement in modern French history, the powerful Croix de Feu (1927- 1936), and its successor, the Parti Social Français, or PSF (1936- 1945), led to a sharp rightward turn in France's political culture. Political Belief in France, 1927- 1945 traces the central role of women in this shift, arguing that they transformed the Croix de Feu/PSF from a paramilitary league for veterans into a social reform movement that sought to remake the politics, society, and culture of the French Republic.Following the creation of a Women's Section in 1934, the women of the Croix de Feu/PSF developed a wide array of social programs, including welfare services, youth development, and health-care initiatives. At a time of economic depression and high unemployment, these popular programs tempered the organization's fearsome reputation as a violent paramilitary group. While the efforts of the Women's Section had the veneer of moderation, they accentuated the long-standing conservative image of France as a deeply Christian society and sought to assimilate people of different ethnoreligious backgrounds into the dominant national community. Croix de Feu/PSF women promoted their socialagenda as a religious and patriotic duty, a reflection of the individual's responsibility to make personal sacrifices on behalf of their vision for France's Christian civilization.The Croix de Feu/PSF's ethnoreligious nationalism circulated throughout the French imperial nation-state, making the movement the premier defender of an empire at the height of its power. But women in North African branches faced substantial marginalization, and the movement remained dangerously sectarian in the Maghreb, driving indigenous activists from reformism to anticolonialism.The Croix de Feu/PSF thus set the stage for both the authoritarian, anti-Semitic Vichy regime and the decolonization that followed the war. The first book on women of the French far right in the age of fascism, Political Belief in France, 1927- 1945 contributes to the fields of French history, gender studies, the history of fascism, and the history of empire.

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During the Civil War, southerners produced a vast body of writing about their northern foes, painting a picture of a money-grubbing, puritanical, and infidel enemy. Damn Yankees! explores the proliferation of this rhetoric and demonstrates how the perpetual vilification of northerners became a weapon during the war, fostering hatred and resistance among the people of the Confederacy.Drawing from speeches, cartoons, editorials, letters, and diaries, Damn Yankees! examines common themes in southern excoriation of the enemy. In sharp contrast to the presumed southern ideals of chivalry and honor, Confederates claimed that Yankees were rootless vagabonds who placed profit ahead of fidelity to religious and social traditions. Pervasive criticism of northerners created a framework for understanding their behavior during the war. When the Confederacy prevailed on the field of battle, it confirmed the Yankees' reputed physical and moral weakness. When the Yankees achieved military success, reports of depravity against vanquished foes abounded, stiffening the resolve of Confederate soldiers and civilians alike to protect their homeland and the sanctity of their women from Union degeneracy.From award-winning Civil War historian George C. Rable, Damn Yankees! is the first comprehensive study of anti-Union speech and writing, the ways these words shaped perceptions of and events in the war, and the rhetoric's enduring legacy in the South after the conflict had ended.

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In the autumn of 1871, Alexis Romanov, the fourth son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, set sail from his homeland for an extended journey through the United States and Canada. A major milestone in U.S.-Russia relations, the tour also served Duke Alexis's family by helping to extricate him from an unsuitable romantic entanglement with the daughter of a poet. Alexis in America recounts the duke's progress through the major American cities, detailing his meetings with celebrated figures such as Samuel Morse and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and describing the national self-reflection that his presence spurred in the American people. The first Russian royal ever to visit the United States, Alexis received a tour through post-Civil War America that emphasized the nation's cultural unity. While the enthusiastic American media breathlessly reported every detail of his itinerary and entourage, Alexis visited Niagara Falls, participated in a bison hunt with Buffalo Bill Cody, and attended the Krewe of Rex's first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. As word of the royal visitor spread, the public flocked to train depots and events across the nation to catch a glimpse of the grand duke. Some speculated that Russia and America were considering a formal alliance, while others surmised that he had come to the United States to find a bride. The tour was not without incident: many city officials balked at spending public funds on Alexis's reception, and there were rumors of an assassination plot by Polish nationals in New York City. More broadly, the visit highlighted problems on the national level, such as political corruption and persistent racism, as well as the emerging cultural and political power of ethnic minorities and the continuing sectionalism between the North and the South. Lee Farrow joins her examination of these cultural underpinnings to a lively narrative of the grand duke's tour, creating an engaging record of a unique moment in international relations.

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In Eldest Daughter, Ava Leavell Haymon displays her mastery of the craft and engages us with the poetic gifts we have come to expect from her. As in previous collections, she combines the sensory and the spiritual in wild verbal fireworks. Concrete descriptions of a woman's life in the mid-twentieth-century American South mix with wider concerns about family lies and truths, and a culture that supports or forbids clear speech.In a passage from The Holy Ghost Attends Vacation Bible School, the physical world of children interplays with the divine: ""The least likely place the Holy Ghost ever descended was in east Mississippi. Red clay hills and church politics soured on years of inbreeding. Every deacon drove a pickup. At Bible School, the kids played red rover and rolled down the sharp slope behind the Baptist church. He recognized the dizziness at the bottom and the fear of having your name called, but the grass stains, the torn blouses, and sprained wrists -- these were beyond Him.""Haymon's poems encourage us to revel in the natural world and enjoy its delights, as well as to confront the difficult realities that keep us from doing so.

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Swamper, a fictitious swamp rabbit, lives in the bottomland hardwood forest, or overflow swamp, which is a very real environment. In twelve ""letters"" addressed to his human friends, Swamper shares his vivid observations about life in a Louisiana swamp. With excitement and captivating detail Swamper explains ecological concepts such as food webs, energy flow, decomposition, and reproduction. He recounts adventures like escaping his predators, the great horned owl and the red fox, and swimming for his life after a flood forces him to find higher ground. The observant swamp rabbit even describes the seasonal migration of birds and the monthly phases of the moon. While educating readers about the interconnected life cycles found in a natural habitat, Swamper's first-hand account of the richness and value of the wetlands will also help them develop a deeper appreciation for this delicate ecosystem. Written for 8- 12-year-olds, the content aligns with life science and environmental science educational standards for 4th through 7th grades. Also Includes:A glossary of key termsQuestions and a creative activity for each letterBiologically accurate drawings of animals and habitatColor photographs of the environmentSupplementary online resources for teachers and parents

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In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish American authors and their interrelationships within both transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time, writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate (O'Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O'Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and contradictions. Flannery O'Connor, for example, resisted identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy, described by some as ""anti-Catholic,"" continues a dialogue with the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish community of Flannery O'Connor's native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza's own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an enduring literature, and a national image.

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From backwoods bars and small-town dives to swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns, Louisiana Saturday Night offers an anecdotal history and experiential guidebook to some of the Gumbo State's most unique blues, Cajun, and zydeco clubs. Music critic Alex V. Cook uncovers south Louisiana's wellspring of musical tradition, showing us that indigenous music exists not as an artifact to be salvaged by preservationists, but serves as a living, breathing, singing, laughing, and crying part of Louisiana culture. Louisiana Saturday Night takes the reader to both offbeat and traditional venues in and around Baton Rouge, Cajun country, and New Orleans, where we hear the distinctive voices of musicians, patrons, and owners -- like Teddy Johnson, born in the house that now serves as Teddy's Juke Joint. Along the way, Cook ruminates on the cultural importance of the people and places he encounters, and shows their critical role in keeping Louisiana's unique music alive. A map, a journal, a snapshot of what goes on in the little shacks off main roads, Louisiana Saturday Night provides an indispensable and entertaining companion for those in pursuit of Louisiana's quirky and varied nightlife.

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The name ""Suzanne Perron"" is synonymous with exquisite detail. Her expertly tailored gowns -- worn at the elaborate balls of Mardi Gras and down the aisle at New Orleans weddings -- draw from the legacy of couture design. After years working alongside Vera Wang, Carolina Herrera, Anna Sui, and Ralph Rucci in New York, Louisiana native Perron returned home in 2005 to open her own custom design business, specializing in once-in-a-lifetime gowns for brides, debutantes, and Mardi Gras royalty. Designing in Ivory and White captures the rise of this talented designer, from her first Singer sewing machine to her success on Seventh Avenue to her post-Katrina move to a city in need of ""something beautiful,"" as well as her design technique and meticulous craft. In addition to her personal story, Perron shares her process from the inside out, including: methods for creating crinolines and foundations; using draping and pattern making to transform a sketch into a three-dimensional form; manipulating fabric into pleats, pintucks, and folds; and hand sewing intricate beading, lace, embroidery, and flawless hems.Her techniques and breathtaking artistry are realized through a showcase of sixteen Suzanne Perron designs. Full-length and detail shots illustrate Perron's gorgeous silhouettes and masterful handwork. Each gown also has a story that illuminates the client experience from the first sketch to the final fitting.Designing in Ivory and White serves as a testament to the ambition and skill required to design unique dresses, and will provide inspiration for independent designers, sewing hobbyists, and all who admire couture fashion.

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Though remembered largely by history as Andrew Jackson's nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson was himself a significant figure in nineteenth-century America: a politician, planter, diplomat, newspaper editor, and vice-presidential candidate. His relationship with his uncle and mentor defined his life, as he struggled to find the political and personal success that he wanted and his uncle thought he deserved. In Old Hickory's Nephew, the first definitive biography of this enigmatic man, Mark R. Cheathem explores both Donelson's political contributions and his complex, tumultuous, and often-overlooked relationship with Andrew Jackson. Born in Sumner County, Tennessee, in 1799, Donelson lost his father only five years later. Andrew Jackson soon became a force in his nephew's life, seeing in his namesake his political protégé. Jackson went so far as to predict that Donelson would one day become president. After attending West Point, Donelson helped establish the Jacksonian wing of the Democratic party and edited a national Democratic newspaper. As a diplomat, he helped bring about the annexation of Texas and, following in his uncle's footsteps, he became the owner of several plantations. On the surface, Donelson was a political and personal success.But few lives are so straightforward. The strong relationship between the uncle and nephew - defined by the concept of honor that suffused the southern society in which they lived - quickly frayed when Donelson and his wife defied his uncle during the infamous Peggy Eaton sex scandal of Jackson's first presidential administration. This resulted, Cheathem shows, in a tense relationship, full of distrust and suspicion, between Donelson and Jackson that lasted until the ""Hero of New Orleans"" died in 1845. Donelson later left the Democratic party in a tiff and joined the American, or Know Nothing, party, which selected him as Millard Fillmore's running mate in 1856. Though Donelson tried to establish himself as his uncle's political successor and legator, his friends and foes alike accused him of trading on his uncle's name to gain political and financial success.The life of Andrew Jackson Donelson illuminates the expectations placed upon young southern men of prominent families as well as the complexities and contradictions in their lives. In this biography, Cheathem awakens interest in a nearly forgotten but nonetheless intriguing figure in American history.

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In William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition, David H. Evans pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James. Though Faulkner was dubbed an idealist after World War II, Evans demonstrates that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and cultural force in the early twentieth century. Tracing pragmatism to its very roots, Evans examines the nineteenth-century confidence man of antebellum literature as the original practitioner of the pragmatic principle that a belief can give rise to its own objects. He casts this figure as the missing link between Faulkner and James, giving him new prominence in the prehistory of pragmatism. Moving on to Jamesian pragmatism, Evans contends that James's central innovation was his ability to define truth in narrative terms - just as the confidence man did - as something subjective and personal that continually shapes reality, rather than a set of static, unchanging facts.In subsequent chapters Evans offers detailed interpretations of three of Faulkner's most important novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, revealing that Faulkner, too, saw truth as fluid. By avoiding conclusion and finality, these three novels embody the pragmatic belief that life and the world are unstable and constantly evolving. Absalom, Absalom! stages a conflict of historical discourses that - much like the pragmatic concept of truth - can never be ultimately resolved. Evans shows us how Faulkner explores the conventional and arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James's criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world.With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.

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Drummer, record producer, bandleader, jazz researcher, and cigar-chomping raconteur Barry Martyn is a New Orleans original who happens to have been born in England. Implausible though this may seem, it makes perfect sense to members of the New Orleans traditional jazz community, who view themselves as an extended family based on merit as much as nativity. For more than forty years, Martyn has been a fixture in the Crescent City's jazz scene, laying down the beat for generations of celebrated musicians and avidly promoting the city's unique musical heritage around the world. In Walking with Legends -- based on over forty hours of interviews with Martyn by fellow British jazz enthusiast and author Mick Burns -- Martyn reflects upon his life in jazz and offers a window into a musical world that few have understood, let alone witnessed from the inside. At the age of nineteen, jazz fanatic Martyn found his way to the Crescent City and began working as a professional drummer in clubs and studios. The first white man in the United States to join a black musician's union, he eventually started his own record label and recorded hundreds of jam sessions that today are regarded as classics in Europe. In 1972, he formed the Legends of Jazz, an old-style New Orleans jazz band that toured the world and took New Orleans jazz into the American showbiz mainstream.Martyn's life story provides unique intimate glimpses of a vanished generation of New Orleans musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Kid Sheik Cola, Harold Dejan, Joe Watkins, Albert Nicholas, Kid Thomas, Andrew Blakeney, and many others. Throughout his chronicle, Martyn highlights the continual clash of cultures that arose from an avid British pupil learning lessons of life and music from elderly African American strangers who take him under their wing both out of curiosity and self-interest. Together, they find a way to connect through music, even if the road gets a little bumpy at times. A standard-bearer for New Orleans's jazz drumming tradition, Martyn remains one of the city's busiest musicians and most avid promoters of New Orleans music. In Walking with Legends, he honors the legacies of the African American musicians who taught and inspired him and affirms the importance of the human relationships that make the music possible.

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David King Gleason provides a grand tour of Virginia's distinctive plantation homes. As the architectural historian Calder Loth states in his prefatory note, ""Gleason's elegant photographs provide a seductive image of life in 'Old Virginia.' He presents one inviting house after another, complete with handsome interiors, and spacious grounds dotted with boxwoods and venerable trees.""Unlike those in the Deep South, most of Virginia's plantation homes were built before the antebellum period and mainly reflect colonial, English Georgian, and Jeffersonian styles of architecture. Gleason has photographed the homes in all seasons, framing some in the pink blossoms of springtime dogwoods, showing others surrounded by the golden hues of autumn, and presenting still others blanketed in January snows. Many of the photographs provide aerial perspectives that encompass not only the homes themselves but outbuildings and dependencies, great lawns and terraced gardens.The book begins with homes in the Tidewater region, where Bacon's Castle, built in 1665 on the south bank of the James River, still stands. It is the oldest surviving house not only in Virginia but in all of English-settled North America. Other houses from the Tidewater region include Westover, considered one of the most beautiful Georgian residences in the United States; Brandon, at one time the home of Benjamin Harrison; Appomattox Manor, where Ulysses S. Grant headquartered for a period during the Civil War; and Carter's Grove, near Williamsburg. In northern Virginia and the Shenandoah valley are Gunston Hall, near Alexandria; Woodlawn, in Fairfax County; Washington's Mount Vernon; and Melrose, a castellated manor inspired by the romantic literature of Sir Walter Scott. In the Piedmont, Gleason photographed such houses as Ash Lawn, the home of James Monroe; Edgemont, an exquisitely proportioned house showing Thomas Jefferson's influence; and Estouteville, whose great center hall opens onto identical Tuscan porticos framing magnificent views of the Virginia countryside. Gleason's photographs of a mist-shrouded Monticello are among the most beautiful in the book. In all, Gleason has photographed more than eighty of Virginia's finest plantation homes. Extensive captions provide concise histories of each house, including its original builder and subsequent owners, and its occupants, either friendly or hostile, during the Revolutionary or Civil wars.

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In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities.Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society—one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation.A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers—the Houma tribe.A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.

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George Bourne was one of the early American republic's first immediate abolitionists, an influential figure who paved the way for the campaign against slavery in the antebellum period. His approach to reform was shaped by a conservative Protestant outlook that became increasingly hostile to Catholicism. In To Preach Deliverance to the Captives, Ryan C. McIlhenny examines the interplay of Bourne's pioneering efforts in abolitionism and his intensely anti-Catholic views. McIlhenny portrays Bourne as both a radical and a conservative, a reformer who desired to get back to the roots of Christianity for the purpose of completely dismantling slavery. Bourne's commentary on a variety of controversial topics, slavery, race, and citizenship; the role of women; Christianity and republicanism; the importance of the Bible; and the place of the church in civil society, put him at the center of many debates. He remains a complex figure: a polymath situated within the political, social, and cultural possibilities of an early republic that he was eager to play a part in shaping. Bourne's religious radicalism gave rise to his hope for an emerging post-revolutionary republic that would focus mainly on its religious foundations. The strength of the American nation, in Bourne's mind, rested not only on institutions indicative of a republican form of government but also on a pure Christianity, exemplified best in historical Protestantism. To Bourne, the future of the fledgling nation depended not only on principles and institutions but also on the activism of Protestant leaders like himself.

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In this subtle and candid collection, Lisa Ampleman mixes contemporary elements and historical materials as she speaks back to the literary tradition of courtly love. Instead of bachelor knights bemoaning their allegedly cruel beloveds, Romances emphasizes the voices of female troubadours, along with those of historical figures such as Dante's wife, Petrarch's Laura, and Anne Boleyn. Ampleman also incorporates the work of the Italian Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa, mentioned in Rilke's Duino Elegies, through a series of adaptations of her verse. Elsewhere, a contemporary sonnet sequence dedicated to Courtney Love shows the 1990s grunge rocker as subject, object, performer, and mother. As her poems reflect on popular romantic ideas about the past, the means by which elegies romanticize the dead, or the conventional romance of a happy marriage, Ampleman addresses a range of romantic entanglements: courtly and commonplace, sentimental and prosaic, toxic and mutual.

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What is the shape of progress inside a subpar environment, when escape is not possible, and life must be measured as the relative extremity of multiple misfortunes? Is it the shape of a bird?"" Miracles Come on Mondays begins with a voice- stark, chilling, totally captivating- that searches a barren landscape for a single receptive ear. With echoes of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Lydia Davis, Penelope Cray creates dark and sometimes darkly funny scenes that most resemble the works of Kafka. Cray's characters strain against the indifference of everyday life until, too tired to yearn anymore, they begin the systematic work of making their worlds mentally and spiritually tolerable. And yet, somehow, there's joy. This book asks us to let go of our ideas of sense and replace them with something better, something that somehow makes more sense than sense. Cray has written a debut work of fiction that feels entirely new and deeply true.

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Jane Austen has resonated with readers across generations like no other writer. More than two hundred years after the publication of her most celebrated novel, Pride and Prejudice, people around the world continue to honor ""dear Jane."" In Performing Jane, Sarah Glosson explores this vibrant fandom, examining a long history of Austen fans engaging with her work, from wearing hand- ­sewn bonnets and period- ­appropriate corsets to creating spirited fanfiction and comical gifsets. Sophisticated and engaging, this study demonstrates that Austen fans of today have a great deal in common with those who loved the English novelist long before the term ""fan"" came into use. Performing Jane analyzes three ways fans engage with Austen and her work: collecting material related to the writer, whether in physical scrapbooks or on social ­-media platforms; creating and consuming imitative works, including fanfiction and modernized adaptations such as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; and making pilgrimages to Steventon, Hampshire, Chawton Cottage, and even to annual meetings of Jane Austen societies. Key to Glosson's exploration of Austen fans is the notion that all of these activities, whether occurring in private or in public, are fundamentally performative. And in counterbalance to studies that center on fans with a tendency to transform and disrupt the original text, this study provides much- ­needed understanding of a fandom that predominantly reaffirms Austen's works. Because Austen's writing has bridged the realms of both literary and popular culture, this fandom serves as an excellent case study to understand the ways in which we draw distinctions between fandom and other forms of intensive engagement and, more importantly, to appreciate how fluid those distinctions can be. Performing Jane embraces a holistic view of the long history of Austen fandom, relying on archival research, literary and visual analyses, and ethnographic study. This groundbreaking book not only demonstrates the ways in which fan practices, today and in the past, are performative, but also provides fresh perspectives into fandom and contributes to our understanding of the ways readers engage with literature.

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When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, thousands of patriotic southerners rushed to enlist for the Confederate cause. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who grew up in the border state of Missouri in a slave-holding family, was among them. Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. After all, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and his numerous speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln, with their trenchant call for racial justice, inspired his crowning as ""the Lincoln of our Literature."" In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. Scattered and long-neglected texts written by Clemens before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, Fulton shows, tout pro-southern sentiments critical of abolitionists, free blacks, and the North for failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. These obscure works reveal the dynamic process that reconstructed Twain in parallel with and response to events on American battlefields and in American politics. Beginning with Clemens's youth in Missouri, Fulton tracks the writer's transformation through the turbulent Civil War years as a southern-leaning reporter in Nevada and San Francisco to his raucous burlesques written while he worked as a Washington correspondent during the impeachment crises of 1867--1868. Fulton concludes with the writer's emergence as the country's satirist-in-chief in the postwar era. By explaining the relationship between the author's early pro-southern writings and his later stance as a champion for racial justice throughout the world, Fulton provides a new perspective on Twain's views and on his deep involvement with Civil War politics.A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.

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Rethinking American Disasters is a pathbreaking collection of essays on hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other calamities in the United States and British colonial America over four centuries. Proceeding from the premise that there is no such thing as a "natural" disaster, the collection invites readers to consider disasters and their aftermaths as artifacts of and vantage points onto their historical contexts.

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In this fascinating little book, John DeMers tells the story of the Vieux Carré cocktail against the evolving backdrop of the ever-rich cocktail culture of New Orleans. Mixologist Walter Bergeron created this distinctive drink in the 1930s at the Hotel Monteleone; it was later dubbed "the Cocktail that Spins" in honor of the slowly turning Carousel Bar at the hotel. It's an iconic cocktail that, in recent years, was rarely ordered or prepared, though that is changing as a new generation of cocktail enthusiasts rediscover the old ways.The Vieux Carré draws on the local proto-cocktail, the Sazerac, as well as several booze-forward classics including the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, and, from Italy, the Negroni. DeMers tells all that is known of Walter Bergeron's early life and also examines the ingredients in this cocktail and how each of them made its way to the Crescent City.

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In this compelling book, Rien Fertel tells the story of humanity's complicated and often brutal relationship with the brown pelican over the past century. This beloved bird with the mythically bottomless belly—to say nothing of its prodigious pouch—has been deemed a living fossil and the most dinosaur-like of creatures. The pelican adorns the Louisiana state flag, serves as a religious icon of sacrifice, and stars in the famous parting shot of Jurassic Park, but, most significantly, spotlights our tenuous connection with the environment in which it flies, feeds, and roosts—the coastal United States. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the first national wildlife refuge at Pelican Island, Florida, in order to rescue the brown pelican, among other species, from the plume trade. Despite such protections, the ubiquity of synthetic "agents of death," most notably DDT, in the mid-twentieth century sent the brown pelican to the list of endangered species. By the mid-1960s, not one viable pelican nest remained in all of Louisiana. Authorities declared the state bird locally extinct. Conservation efforts—including an outlandish but well-planned birdnapping—saved the brown pelican, generating one of the great success stories in animal preservation. However, the brown pelican is once again under threat, particularly along Louisiana's coast, due to land loss and rising seas. For centuries, artists and writers have portrayed the pelican as a bird that pierces its breast to feed its young, symbolizing saintly piety. Today, the brown pelican gives itself in other ways, sacrificed both by and for the environment as a bellwether bird—an indicator species portending potential disasters that await. Brown Pelican combines history and first-person narrative to complicate, deconstruct, and reassemble our vision of the bird, the natural world, and ourselves.

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In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to "the world's toughest drainage problem," renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he chronicles the herculean attempts to "reclaim" the city's swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for massive urban expansion.The study begins with a vivid description of a festive event on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, which attracted an entourage of elite New Orleanians to the edge of Bayou Barataria to witness the christening of giant water pumps. President Woodrow Wilson, connected via phoneline from the White House, planned to activate the station with the push of a button, effectively draining the West Bank of New Orleans. What transpired in the years and decades that followed can only be understood by examining the large swath of history dating back two centuries earlier—to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta—and extending through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times. The consequences of dewatering New Orleans proved both triumphant and tragic. The city's engineering prowess transformed it into a world leader in drainage technology, yet the municipality also fell victim to its own success. Rather than a story about mud and machinery, this is a history of people, power, and the making of place. Campanella emphasizes the role of determined and sometimes unsavory individuals who spearheaded projects to separate water from dirt, creating lucrative opportunities in the process not only for the community but also for themselves.

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In The Last Fire-Eater, renowned historian of the American South William A. Link examines the life of Roger A. Pryor, a Virginia secessionist, Confederate general, and earnest proponent of postwar sectional reconciliation whose life involved a series of remarkable transformations. Pryor's journey, Link reveals, mirrored that of the South. At times, both proved puzzling and contradictory. Pryor recast himself during a crucial period in southern history between the 1850s and the close of the nineteenth century. An archetypical southern-rights advocate, Pryor became a skilled practitioner in the politics of honor. As a politician and newspaper editor, he engaged in duels and viewed the world through the cultural prism of southern honor, assuming a more militant and aggressive stance on slavery than most of his regional peers. Later, he served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of brigadier general and seeing action across the Eastern Theater. Captured late in the conflict, Pryor soon after abandoned his fiery persona and renounced extremism. He then moved to New York City, where he emerged as a prominent lawyer and supporter of the sort of intersectional detente that stood as a central facet of what southern boosters labeled the "New South." Dramatic change characterized Pryor's long life. Born in 1828, he died four months after the end of World War I. He witnessed fundamental shifts in the South that included the destruction of slavery, the defeat of the Confederacy, and the redefinition of manhood and honor among elite white men who relied less on violence to resolve personal grievances. With Pryor's lifetime of remakings as its focus, The Last Fire-Eater serves as a masterful history of transformation in the South.

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With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison's evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison's legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation's ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race. Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation's past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison's ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting . . . Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison's thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements. Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison's work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought.

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Animals mattered in the Civil War. Horses and mules powered the Union and Confederate armies, providing mobility for wagons, pulling artillery pieces, and serving as fighting platforms for cavalrymen. Drafted to support the war effort, horses often died or suffered terrible wounds on the battlefield. Raging diseases also swept through army herds and killed tens of thousands of other equines. In addition to weaponized animals such as horses, pets of all kinds accompanied nearly every regiment during the war. Dogs commonly served as unit mascots and were also used in combat against the enemy. Living and fighting in the natural environment, soldiers often encountered a variety of wild animals. They were pestered by many types of insects, marveled at exotic fish while being transported along the coasts, and took shots at alligators in the swamps along the lower Mississippi River basin.Animal Histories of the Civil War Era charts a path to understanding how the animal world became deeply involved in the most divisive moment in American history. In addition to discussions on the dominant role of horses in the war, one essay describes the use of camels by individuals attempting to spread slavery in the American Southwest in the antebellum period. Another explores how smaller wildlife, including bees and other insects, affected soldiers and were in turn affected by them. One piece focuses on the congressional debate surrounding the creation of a national zoo, while another tells the story of how the famous show horse Beautiful Jim Key and his owner, a former slave, exposed sectional and racial fault lines after the war. Other topics include canines, hogs, vegetarianism, and animals as veterans in post–Civil War America.The contributors to this volume—scholars of animal history and Civil War historians—argue for an animal-centered narrative to complement the human-centered accounts of the war. Animal Histories of the Civil War Era reveals that warfare had a poignant effect on animals. It also argues that animals played a vital role as participants in the most consequential conflict in American history. It is time to recognize and appreciate the animal experience of the Civil War period.

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George Bradley's A Stroll in the Rain is at once a retrospective volume and a new advance in the career of one of our most accomplished poets. Distilling more than thirty-five years of his work, this volume exhibits a wide variety of styles and forms, ranging from brief lyric to extended verse essay, establishing moods that encompass humor, tenderness, and surprise. The substantial section of new work shows Bradley deepening his exploration of the only two topics finally available to any author: the mystery of human consciousness and the unassimilable fact of death.From agriculture to astrophysics, from New England winters to Tuscan summers, and much else besides, A Stroll in the Rain presents spirited, often witty poetry that is skillful, rich, and fun.

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Marlene Trestman's Most Fortunate Unfortunates is the first comprehensive history of the Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans. Founded in 1855 in the aftermath of a yellow fever epidemic, the Home was the first purpose-built Jewish orphanage in the nation. It reflected the city's affinity for religiously operated orphanages and the growing prosperity of its Jewish community. In 1904, the orphanage founded the Isidore Newman School, a coed, nonsectarian school that was also open to children, regardless of religion, whose parents paid tuition. By the time the Jewish Orphans' Home closed in 1946, it had sheltered more than sixteen hundred parentless children and two dozen widows from New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana and the mid-South.Based on deep archival research and numerous interviews of alumni and their descendants, Most Fortunate Unfortunates provides a view of life in the Jewish Orphans' Home for the children and women who lived there. The study also traces the forces that impelled the Home's founders and leaders—both the heralded men and otherwise overlooked women—to create and maintain the institution that Jews considered the "pride of every Southern Israelite." While Trestman celebrates the Home's many triumphs, she also delves deeply into its failures.Most Fortunate Unfortunates is sure to be of widespread interest to readers interested in southern Jewish history, gender and race relations, and the evolution of social work and dependent childcare.

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From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro ­-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels- ­Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels ­-Rauterkus contests the long ­-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels- ­Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels ­-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels ­-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro- ­Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels- ­Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

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The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill marks a significant development in literary recovery efforts related to Assia Wevill (1927–1969), who remains a critically important figure in the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sylvia Plath and the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Editors Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter K. Steinberg located over 150 texts authored by Assia Wevill and curated them into a collected scholarly edition of her letters, journals, poems, and other creative writings. These documents chronicle her personal and professional lives, her experiences as a single working mother in 1960s London, her domestic life with Hughes, and her celebrated translations of poetry by Yehuda Amichai. The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill offers an invaluable documentary resource for understanding a woman whose life continues to captivate readers and scholars.

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Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism is the first book to examine the connections linking two major American writers of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway. In twelve critical essays, accompanied by a foreword from Wharton scholar Laura Rattray and a critical introduction by volume editor Lisa Tyler, contributors reveal the writers' overlapping contexts, interests, and aesthetic techniques. Thematic sections highlight modernist trends found in each author's works. To begin, Peter Hays and Ellen Andrews Knodt argue for reading Wharton as a modernist writer, noting how her works feature characteristics that critics customarily credit to a younger generation of writers, including Hemingway. Since Wharton and Hemingway each volunteered for humanitarian medical service in World War I, then drew upon their experiences in subsequent literary works, Jennifer Haytock and Milena Radeva-Costello analyze their powerful perspectives on the cataclysmic conflict traditionally viewed as marking the advent of modernism in literature. In turn, Cecilia Macheski and Sirpa Salenius consider the authors' passionate representations of Italy, informed by personal sojourns there, in which they observed its beautiful landscapes and culture, its liberating contrast with the United States, and its period of fascist politics. Linda Wagner-Martin, Lisa Tyler, and Anna Green focus on the complicated gender politics embedded in the works of Wharton and Hemingway, as evidenced in their ideas about female agency, sexual liberation, architecture, and modes of transportation. In the collection's final section, Dustin Faulstick, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, and Parley Ann Boswell address suggestive intertextualities between the two authors with respect to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, their serialized publications in Scribner's Magazine, and their affinities with the literary and cinematic tradition of noir. Together, the essays in this engaging collection prove that comparative studies of Wharton and Hemingway open new avenues for understanding the pivotal aesthetic and cultural movements central to the development of American literary modernism.

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Mark Twain's visions of the Mississippi River offer some of the most indelible images in American literature: Huck and Jim floating downstream on their raft, Tom Sawyer and friends becoming pirates on Jackson's Island, the young Sam Clemens himself at the wheel of a steamboat. Through Twain's iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain's river occupies in the national imaginary, until now no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume.Thomas Ruys Smith's Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain is the first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Twain's intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity. It follows Twain's remarkable connection to the Mississippi, from his early years on the river as a steamboat pilot, through his most significant literary statements, to his final reflections on the crooked stream that wound its way through his life and imagination. Alongside Twain's evolving relationship to the river, Deep Water details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period, from roustabouts to canoeists, from books for boys to blues songs, and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river. Smith weaves together these perspectives, putting Twain and his creations in conversation with a dynamic cast of river characters who helped transform the Mississippi into a vibrant American icon.By balancing evocative cultural history with thought-provoking discussions of some of Twain's most important and beloved works, Deep Water gives readers a new sense of both the Mississippi and the remarkable writer who made the river his own.

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Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty - Kirkus Review (Starred Review)""People, the species defies logic!"" reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the story's narrator has wronged or been wronged by.Upton's stories frequently draw inspiration from books, books as art objects or lost objects, as inspiration or points of contention. ""Night Walkers"" tells the story of the world's laziest book club, while ""A Story's End"" follows a woman's search for the last book read by her mother before her sudden death. Elsewhere, the ghosts of literature and writers past haunt the characters' present: ""The Tell-All Heart"" sees a woman falling in love with Edgar Allan Poe's discarded suit, and an unruly, unpredictable shadow creeps in a child's window to demand that he cut off the other hand of Captain Hook in ""A Shadow.""In the surreal yet playful tradition of Karen Russell and George Saunders, Visitations brings together seventeen incandescent short stories from a writer at the height of her powers.

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