Search results for ""Louisiana State University Press""

Fonville Winans achieved fame with his crisp black-and- white photographs of midcentury Louisiana life, capturing indelible images of Depression-era Cajuns on Grand Isle, brides and socialites around Baton Rouge, and an array of (sometimes notorious) politicians and public figures. But many locals also knew the renowned photographer as a passionate cook who spent decades experimenting in the kitchen and perfecting dishes that ranged from Louisiana creole classics to popular foods and international cuisines, along with a healthy dose of cocktails for entertaining. The Fonville Winans Cookbook features over 100 recipes created by the world-famous photographer, often accompanied by his notes on his cooking trials as well as his comments on successful dishes.After Fonville's death in 1992, his daughter-in-law Melinda discovered journals full of original recipes, many extensively annotated over the years with his remarks on how to prepare dishes that would live up to his demanding standards. This bon vivant's love of spicy, roux-based dishes is evident in a dizzying array of recipes for Cajun gumbos, bisques, rice dishes, and other Louisiana staples. The state's celebrated seafood features in the recipes as well, with crabs and crawfish as central ingredients of many dishes, including his iconic Pintail Crab Stew, named for the boat in which he explored the coasts of Grand Isle in the 1930s. Fonville also investigated food trends popular in the 1950s and 1960s, developing his own recipes for unusual dishes such as Jook, Azafrán Rice, and Coquina Stew. His appreciation for Mexican food resulted in recipes for margaritas, mole, and, of course, hot tamales, which he made by hand.Along with a biography of Fonville culled from the memories of family members and friends, The Fonville Winans Cookbook presents dozens of his photographs, including many images never before published. It offers a new perspective on a man celebrated for capturing the spirit of Louisiana, pairing beautiful photography with easy-to-prepare, satisfying recipes steeped in the state's culture and cuisine.

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The Civil War era marked the dawn of American wars of military occupation, inaugurating a tradition that persisted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that continues to the present. In the Wake of War traces how volunteer and even professional soldiers found themselves tasked with the unprecedented project of wartime and peacetime military occupation, initiating a national debate about the changing nature of American military practice that continued into Reconstruction.In the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, citizen-soldiers confronted the complicated challenges of invading, occupying, and subduing hostile peoples and nations. Drawing on firsthand accounts from soldiers in United States occupation forces, Andrew F. Lang shows that many white volunteers equated their martial responsibilities with those of standing armies, which were viewed as corrupting institutions hostile to the republican military ethos. With the advent of emancipation came the enlistment of African American troops into Union armies, facilitating an extraordinary change in how provisional soldiers interpreted military occupation. Black soldiers, many of whom had been formerly enslaved, garrisoned regions defeated by Union armies and embraced occupation as a tool for destabilizing the South's long-standing racial hierarchy. Ultimately, Lang argues, traditional fears about the army's role in peacetime society, grounded in suspicions of standing military forces and heated by a growing ambivalence about racial equality, governed the trials of Reconstruction.Focusing on how U.S. soldiers, white and black, volunteer and regular, enacted and critiqued their unprecedented duties behind the lines during the Civil War era, In the Wake of War reveals the dynamic, often problematic conditions of military occupation.

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In Maintaining Segregation, LeeAnn G. Reynolds explores how black and white children in the early twentieth-century South learned about segregation in their homes, schools, and churches. As public lynchings and other displays of racial violence declined in the 1920s, a culture of silence developed around segregation, serving to forestall, absorb, and deflect individual challenges to the racial hierarchy. The cumulative effect of the racial instruction southern children received, prior to highly publicized news such as the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, perpetuated segregation by discouraging discussion or critical examination.As the system of segregation evolved throughout the early twentieth century, generations of southerners came of age having little or no knowledge of life without institutionalized segregation. Reynolds examines the motives and approaches of white and black parents to racial instruction in the home and how their methods reinforced the status quo. Whereas white families sought to preserve the legal system of segregation and their place within it, black families faced the more complicated task of ensuring the safety of their children in a racist society without sacrificing their sense of self-worth. Schools and churches functioned as secondary sites for racial conditioning, and Reynolds traces the ways in which these institutions alternately challenged and encouraged the marginalization of black Americans both within society and the historical narrative.In order for subsequent generations to imagine and embrace the sort of racial equality championed by the civil rights movement, they had to overcome preconceived notions of race instilled since childhood. Ultimately, Reynolds's work reveals that the social change that occurred due to the civil rights movement can only be fully understood within the context of the segregation imposed upon children by southern institutions throughout much of the early twentieth century.

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Pardon me, but I'm shivering a bit at my core. These are restless, storm-hued stanzas, revelations of our dark cravings and hapless, woefully imperfect attempts at perfect love. Here are the dreams even our dreams won't reveal, flaunting wild edges and endings that nudge the soul, each fusing of lyric and lesson as potent as a backhand slap. And Mama watches everything. Mama sees it all."" - Patricia Smith""What's living without fear of getting lost?"" That's only one of many empowering moments in Jennifer Givhan's auspicious debut. Her ""blood magic"" ink delivers the hard truths that kick-start the healing of the ""splintered cactus"" that hurdles the path of a woman's journey. Landscape with Headless Mama blossoms with the ""strange alloys of sadness"" that devastate motherhood and femininity, and then nurture their wounds back to vibrant life."" - Rigoberto González""In Jennifer Givhan's Landscape with Headless Mama, the vivid truth of these poems evokes both the wince of pain and the head-rush of joy, the familial and the romantic disconnections we endure and those connections found in the same terrain that we, still, manage to cherish. If there's a line in these poems that doesn't surprise, I couldn't find it; one never knows where the poem will take us. I found myself tracing ""maps of the borderland into my body/ cliff dwelling, the taste of red brick on the tongue…."" Each figure rendered, each voice conjured comes to life with their distinct journey, and Givhan continues to remind us of yet another truth: ""There are other ways for the story to end."" Indeed, the possibilities seem limitless in this world she builds. If a collection of poems can be called a page-turner, this is what it feels like."" - A. Van Jordan""These are true border poems, restlessly crossing between the real and the surreal, the loved and the used up, the fertile and the infertile, and the hungry and the sated. Jennifer Givhan is a dangerous poet in all the necessary ways.""- Connie VoisineLandscape with Headless Mama explores the experiences of becoming and being a mother through the lens of dark fairy tales. Describing the book as ""a surreal survival guide,"" Givhan draws from the southwestern desert, incorporating Latin American fine art and folkloric influences. Drawing inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, tattoo artists, and comic book heroes, among other sources, this is a book of intelligence, humor, deep feeling, and, above all, duende.

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In 1914, the U.S. Navy established its first air station in Pensacola, Florida. Two years later, the U.S. Army, after training its pilots in the skies of Texas, conducted its first combat flights. In the decades that followed and through World War II, the Gulf South welcomed over two hundred air bases and Naval air stations. By the close of the twentieth century these installations had fostered critical advances in pilot training, producing many of the most acclaimed military personnel to take to the skies. Vincent P. Caire's authoritative and inspiring photographic survey recognizes Gulf South aviation heroes like Brig. Gen. Claire Chennault and honors the role of key southern military air facilities like Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases.For more than a hundred years, the Gulf South- defined here as Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas- has supported advancement in every branch of military aviation, contributing both technical prowess and fearless pilots to U.S. forces. Through many never-before-published photographs and an informative text, Military Aviation in the Gulf South celebrates these achievements, including the massive expansion of aviation in World War II, establishment of training facilities for officers- including Hollywood stars and the Tuskegee airmen- and commissioning of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron. Caire's comprehensive history also highlights innovation- such as the designs of Lt. Harold L. Clark for Randolph Air Force Base- and sacrifice, like that of World War I pilot 2nd Lt. Samuel Keesler, the namesake of the Biloxi, Mississippi, base.For generations of servicemen and women, their families, and the local civilian communities that support them, Military Aviation in the Gulf South pays tribute to the enduring impact of the region's aviation programs on America's security and the defense of freedom worldwide.

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In comical and complex poems, David Kirby examines our extraordinarily human condition through the lens of our ordinary daily lives. These keenly observant poems range from the streets of India, Russia, Turkey, and Port Arthur, Texas, to the imaginations of fellow poets Keats and Rilke, and to ruminations on the mundane side of life via the imperfect sandwich. Whether remembering girls' singing groups of the 1950s or recounting a child asking his priest if his dog would go to heaven, Kirby has the ability to make us laugh, but he can also bring us to tears through our laughter.

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Drawing on the history of the British gentry to explain the contrasting sentiments of American small farmers and plantation owners, James L. Huston's expansive analysis offers a new understanding of the socioeconomic factors that fueled sectionalism and ignited the American Civil War. This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Rather, Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-56 and the birth of a sectionalized party system. Huston shows that over 70 percent of the northern population-by far the dominant economic and social element-had close ties to agriculture. More invested in egalitarianism and personal competency than in capitalism, small farmers in the North operated under a free labor ideology that emphasized the ideals of independence and mastery over oneself. The ideology of the plantation, by contrast, reflected the conservative ethos of the British aristocracy, which was the product of immense landed inequality and the assertion of mastery over others. By examining the dominant populations in northern and southern congressional districts, Huston reveals that economic interests pitted the plantation South against the small-farm North. The northern shift toward Republicanism depended on farmers, not industrialists: While Democrats won the majority of northern farm congressional districts from 1842 to 1853, they suffered a major defection of these districts from 1854 to 1856, to the antislavery organizations that would soon coalesce into the Republican Party. Utilizing extensive historical research and close examination of the voting patterns in congressional districts across the country, James Huston provides a remarkable new context for the origins of the Civil War.

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Long after the Civil War ended, one conflict raged on: the battle to define and shape the war's legacy. Across the Bloody Chasm deftly examines Civil War veterans' commemorative efforts and the concomitant -- and sometimes conflicting -- movement for reconciliation.Though former soldiers from both sides of the war celebrated the history and values of the newly reunited America, a deep divide remained between people in the North and South as to how the country's past should be remembered and the nation's ideals honored. Union soldiers could not forget that their southern counterparts had taken up arms against them, while Confederates maintained that the principles of states' rights and freedom from tyranny aligned with the beliefs and intentions of the founding fathers. Confederate soldiers also challenged northern claims of a moral victory, insisting that slavery had not been the cause of the war, and ferociously resisting the imposition of postwar racial policies. M. Keith Har-ris argues that although veterans remained committed to reconciliation, the sectional sensibilities that influenced the memory of the war left the North and South far from a meaningful accord.Harris's masterful analysis of veteran memory assesses the ideological commitments of a generation of former soldiers, weaving their stories into the larger narrative of the process of national reunification. Through regimental histories, speeches at veterans' gatherings, monument dedications, and war narratives, Harris uncovers how veterans from both sides kept the deadliest war in American history alive in memory at a time when the nation seemed determined to move beyond conflict.

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The poultry processing industry in El Dorado, Arkansas, was an economic powerhouse in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was the largest employer in the interconnected region of South Arkansas and North Louisiana surrounding El Dorado, and the fates of many related companies and farms depended on its continued financial success. We Just Keep Running the Line is the story of the rise of the poultry processing industry in El Dorado and the labor force -- composed primarily of black women -- upon which it came to rely.At a time when agricultural jobs were in decline and Louisiana stood at the forefront of rising anti-welfare sentiment, much of the work available in the area went to men, driving women into less attractive, labor-intensive jobs. LaGuana Gray argues that the justification for placing African American women in the lowest-paying and most dangerous of these jobs, like poultry processing, derives from longstanding mischaracterizations of black women by those in power. In evaluating the perception of black women as ""less"" than white women -- less feminine, less moral, less deserving of social assistance, and less invested in their families' and communities' well-being -- Gray illuminates the often-exploitative nature of southern labor, the growth of the agribusiness model of food production, and the role of women of color in such food industries.Using collected oral histories to allow marginalized women of color to tell their own stories and to contest and reshape narratives commonly used against them, We Just Keep Running the Line explores the physical and psychological toll this work took on black women, analyzing their survival strategies and their fight to retain their humanity in an exploitative industry.

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A Broken Regiment recounts the tragic history of one of the Civil War's most ill-fated Union military units. organised in the late summer of 1862, the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry was unprepared for battle a month later, when it entered the fight at Antietam. The results were catastrophic: nearly a quarter of the men were killed or wounded, and Connecticut's 16th panicked and fled the field. In the years that followed, the regiment participated in minor skirmishes before surrendering en masse in North Carolina in 1864. Most of its members spent months in southern prison camps, including the notorious Andersonville stockade, where disease and starvation took the lives of over one hundred members of the unit.The struggles of the 16th led survivors to reflect on the true nature of their military experience during and after the war, and questions of cowardice and courage, patriotism and purpose, were often foremost in their thoughts. Over time, competing stories emerged of who they were, why they endured what they did, and how they should be remembered. By the end of the century, their collective recollections reshaped this troubling and traumatic past, and the ""unfortunate regiment"" emerged as ""The Brave Sixteenth,"" their individual memories and accounts altered to fit the more heroic contours of the Union victory.The product of over a decade of research, Lesley J. Gordon's A Broken Regiment illuminates this unit's complex history amid the interplay of various, and often competing, voices. The result is a fascinating and heartrending story of one regiment's wartime and postwar struggles.

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During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the pejorative term ""scalawag"" referred to white southerners loyal to the Republican Party. With the onset of the federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, scalawags challenged the restoration of the antebellum political and social orders. Derided as opportunists, uneducated ""poor white trash,"" Union sympathizers, and race traitors, scalawags remain largely misunderstood even today. In The Louisiana Scalawags, Frank J. Wetta offers the first in-depth analysis of these men and their struggle over the future of Louisiana. A significant assessment of the interplay of politics, race, and terrorism during Reconstruction, this study answers an array of questions about the origin and demise of the scalawags, and debunks much of the negative mythology surrounding them.Contrary to popular thought, the southern white Republicans counted among their ranks men of genuine accomplishment and talent. They worked in fields as varied as law, business, medicine, journalism, and planting, and many held government positions as city officials, judges, parish officeholders, and state legislators in the antebellum years. Wetta demonstrates that a strong sense of nationalism often motivated the men, no matter their origins.Louisiana's scalawags grew most active and influential during the early stages of Reconstruction, when they led in founding the state's Republican Party. The vast majority of white Louisianans, however, rejected the scalawags' appeal to form an alliance with the freedmen in a biracial political party. Eventually, the influence of the scalawags succumbed to persistent terrorism, corruption, and competition from the white carpetbaggers and their black Republican allies. By then, the state's Republican Party consisted of white political leaders without any significant white constituency. According to Wetta, these weaknesses, as well as ineffective federal intervention in response to a Democratic Party insurgency, caused the Republican Party to collapse and Reconstruction to fail in Louisiana.

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In 1932 a young Fonville Winans (1911-1992) left his home in Fort Worth and set out on the waterways of south Louisiana searching for adventure and fortune. This journal recounts, in his own words, how the now-renowned photographer and his two friends - first mate Bob Owen and second mate Don Horridge - ventured onto untamed Louisiana waters aboard a leaking, rudderless sailboat, the Pintail. Fonville was shooting footage for a movie that he felt certain would make them rich and famous, telling the story of subtropical south Louisiana's remote coastal landscapes and its curious people. The project was ambitious and risky - just the right combination for three young Texans with hopes of stardom. Developing his photographic skill, Fonville traveled during the summers of 1932 and 1934 to swamps, barrier islands, and reefs, from Grand Isle to New Orleans to the Atchafalaya, making friends and taking pictures. The journal, in effect, layers Fonville's unique voice over his now-iconic visual record of moving images and stills. Robert L. Winans selected more than one hundred photos to accompany his father's diary entries, offering a fascinating inner look at Fonville Winans's world.

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In celebration of Louisiana State University's sesquicentennial, Treasures of LSU trumpets the numerous and diverse riches found throughout the Baton Rouge campus and beyond. The 101 distinguished artworks, architectural gems, research collections, and scientific and cultural artifacts highlighted here represent only a small fraction of the material resources that surround and engage LSU faculty, staff, and students on a daily basis. As LSU chancellor emeritus Paul W. Murrill declares in his foreword, ""All reflect expressions of superb quality. All encourage, in one way or another, the human spirit to soar.""Some of these treasures act as artistic backdrops to everyday campus life. In Unity Ascending, the striking Frank Hayden sculpture, greets all who enter the LSU Student Union. Vibrant Depression-era murals decorate the corridors of Allen Hall. Other treasures reside in out-of-the-way places. The Department of Geology and Geophysics houses the Henry V. Howe Type Collection of shelled microorganisms -- tiny, beautifully varied fossils that frequently aid geologists in determining the ages of rocks and features of ancient environments. The LSU Museum of Natural Science, in Foster Hall, holds one of the largest and most prestigious research collections of bird specimens in the world.An LSU cadet uniform and a hand-spun Acadian quilt from the LSU Textile & Costume Museum; an enchanting silky-camellia specimen from the collections of the LSU Herbarium, founded in 1869; pottery by Walter Anderson and portraits by William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds from the LSU Museum of Art -- all showcase the immense variety of LSU's assets. Other featured treasures include a historic dogtrot house at the LSU Rural Life Museum, John James Audubon's double elephant folio Birds of America from the E. A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection at Hill Memorial Library, and cherished campus landmarks like the Indian Mounds, the French House, and Mike the Tiger's habitat.Full-page color photographs set off the treasures to stunning effect. Interpretive essays by LSU faculty, staff, and students explain the origins, history, and sometimes myths surrounding each item. Published by LSU Press during its seventy-fifth year of operation, Treasures of LSU is itself a treasure that inspires pleasure and amazement in discovering the wealth and diversity of LSU's resources and affirms the university's numerous cultural contributions to the world community.

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One of the bloodiest days in American military history, the Battle of Antietam turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the North and delivered the first major defeat to Robert E. Lee's army. In The Gleam of Bayonets, James V. Murfin gives a compelling account of the events and personalities involved in this momentous battle. The gentleness and patience of Lincoln, the vacillations of McClellan, and the grandeur of Lee- all unfold before the reader. The battle itself is presented with precision and scope as Murfin blends together atmosphere and fact, emotions and tactics, into a dramatic and coherent whole. Originally published in 1965, The Gleam of Bayonets is now recognized as a classic and the standard against which all books on Antietam are measured.

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The poems in Fanatic Heart, Deboarah Pope's remarkably accomplished first collection of verse, are distinguished by their sensuous language, assured voice, and surpassing intelligence. ""These are poems with a definite edge to them,"" notes the poet Betty Adcock. Memory and identity, family and place, lives that encompass both ""the wingsweep of joy"" and ""the fierce hug of grief"", these are Pope's concerns. Hers are poems of pain and loss, but they are also, and more tellingly, poems of wonder, of love and passion in their various guises, of the ambiguity in every human relation, an ambiguity skillfully evoked in ""Signs"":In these woods we have chosen with scarcely more knowing than we chose each other, prospects will always promise more than they come to. The solidity of this house is surface, the permanence of anything is myth. We take our visions edged, at home in a light that curves. Still, as they gypsies say, good road.The poems are set in a carefully articulated natural world, those sensual beauty Pope captures in such lines as these from ""Peaches"":They will be all over the ground, gold-dusted, giving softly under the balls of our feet, size of apricots, no good for eating, but the smell will be delicious.Deborah Pope's poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realised, whose very personal yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry's fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope's skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given.

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Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Publication of Volume III of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti brings to a conclusion the first definitive, variorum edition of the poems of this greatest woman poet of the Victorian Age.R.W. Crump divides the final volume, containing the poems Christina did not include in her published collections of verse, into three main sections. In the first are those poems Christina published separately in anthologies, periodicals, or her own prose works, such as Commonplace, and Other Short Stories. The second group consists of privately printed poems, including, most notably, those from the 1847 Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother. The extant poems that Christina never published make up the third and by far largest section of Volume III. Crump's voluminous textual notes and appendixes give the variant readings and provide additional information on the poems.A special feature of Volume III is the incorporation of the texts of poems in the hitherto unknown 375-page Verses manuscript of 1893, a major discovery made since Volume II was published in 1986. Some of the material in the appendixes updates the first two volumes in light of this discovery.

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In The Politics of Faith during the Civil War, Timothy L. Wesley examines the engagement of both northern and southern preachers in politics during the American Civil War, revealing an era of denominational, governmental, and public scrutiny of religious leaders. Controversial ministers risked ostracism within the local community, censure from church leaders, and arrests by provost marshals or local police. In contested areas of the Upper Confederacy and Border Union, ministers occasionally faced deadly violence for what they said or would not say from their pulpits. Even silence on political issues did not guarantee a preacher's security, as both sides arrested clergymen who defied the dictates of civil and military authorities by refusing to declare their loyalty in sermons or to pray for the designated nation, army, or president. The generation that fought the Civil War lived in arguably the most sacralized culture in the history of the United States. The participation of church members in the public arena meant that ministers wielded great authority. Wesley outlines the scope of that influence and considers, conversely, the feared outcomes of its abuse. By treating ministers as both individual men of conscience and leaders of religious communities, Wesley reveals that the reticence of otherwise loyal ministers to bring politics into the pulpit often grew not out of partisan concerns but out of doctrinal, historical, and local factors.The Politics of Faith during the Civil War sheds new light on the political motivations of homefront clergymen during wartime, revealing how and why the Civil War stands as the nation's first concerted campaign to check the ministry's freedom of religious expression.

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In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system.As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie.Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art.The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.

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Literature on the civil rights movement has long highlighted the leadership of ministerial men and young black revolutionaries, such as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X. Recent studies have begun to explore female participation in the struggle for racial justice, but women continue to be relegated to the margins of civil rights history. In Our Minds on Freedom, Shannon Frystak explores the organizational and leadership roles female civil rights activists in Louisiana played from the 1920s to the 1960s. She highlights a diverse group of courageous women who fought alongside their brothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, to achieve a more racially just Louisiana.From the Depression through World War II and the postwar years, Frystak shows, black women in Louisiana joined and led local unions and civil rights organizations, agitating for voting rights and equal treatment in the public arena, in employment, and in admission to the state's institutions of higher learning. At the same time, black and white women began to find common ground in organizations such as the YWCA, the NAACP, and the National Urban League. Frystak explores how women of both races worked together to organize the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott, which served as inspiration for the more famous Montgomery bus boycott two years later; to alter the system of unequal education throughout the state; and to integrate New Orleans schools after the 1954 Brown decision.In the early 1960s, a new generation of female activists joined their older counterparts to work with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and a number of local grassroots civil rights organizations. Frystak vividly describes the very real dangers they faced canvassing for voter registration in Louisiana's rural areas, teaching in Freedom Schools, and hosting out-of-town civil rights workers in their homes.As Frystak shows, the civil rights movement allowed women to step out of their prescribed roles as wives, mothers, and daughters and become significant actors, indeed leaders, in a social-change structure largely dominated by men. Our Minds on Freedom is a welcome addition to the literature of the civil rights movement and will intrigue those interested in African American history, women's history, Louisiana, or the U.S. South.

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Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Art Spiegelman, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing. The twenty essays in The Other 1980s illuminate many works hailed as innovative in their day that have nonetheless fallen from critical view, partly because they challenge the contours of conventional comics studies scholarship: open-ended serials that eschew the graphic-novel format beloved by literature departments; sprawling superhero narratives with no connection to corporate universes; offbeat and abandoned experiments by major publishers, including Marvel and DC; idiosyncratic and experimental independent comics; unusual genre exercises filtered through deeply personal sensibilities; and oft-neglected offshoots of the classic ""underground"" comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The collection also offers original examinations of the ways in which the fans and critics of the day engaged with creators and publishers, establishing the groundwork for much of the contemporary critical and academic discourse on comics. By uncovering creators and works long ignored by scholars, The Other 1980s revises standard histories of this major period and offers a more nuanced understanding of the context from which the iconic comics of the 1980s emerged.

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Between 1919 and 1941, five relatives of Christopher Lee Manes were diagnosed with an illness then referred to as ""leprosy"" and now known as Hansen's disease. After their diagnosis, the five Landry siblings were separated from their loved ones and sent to the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, where they remained in quarantine until their deaths. Drawing on historical documents and imaginative reconstructions, Naming the Leper tells through poetry this family's haunting story of exile and human suffering. While confined at Carville, the Landry siblings attempted to keep some connection to the outside world by writing letters to family members and other loved ones. Manes incorporates materials from this correspondence, along with medical records, the leprosarium newsletter, and personal interviews, as he crafts poems that reconstruct his relatives' daily lives at Carville. Although much can only be imagined, their words remain factual and their feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and pain become explicit. Poetry cannot bring Manes's relatives back to life, nor can it heal wounds nearly a century old, but it can capture the sufferings and traumas caused by disease and exile. As a work of documentary poetry, Naming the Leper demonstrates that a term like ""leper,"" whether a stigma attached to patients suffering from illness or a word inscribed on the caskets of the deceased, cannot define the lives of individuals or encompass the full extent of their legacies.

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When a crowd began to gather outside the jail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the evening of May 31, 1921, the fate of one of its prisoners, a young black male, seemed assured. Accused of attempting to rape a white woman, Dick Rowland was with little doubt about to be lynched. But in another part of town, a small group of black men, many of them World War I veterans, decided to risk lives for a different vision of justice. Before it was all over, Tulsa had erupted into one of America's worst racial nightmares, leaving scores dead and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed. Exhaustively researched, Death in a Promised Land is the compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and yellow journalism, and of an embattled black community's struggle to hold onto its land and freedom. More than just the chronicle of one of the nation's most devastating race riots, this critically acclaimed study of American race relations is, above all, a gripping story of terror and lawlessness, and of courage, heroism, and human perseverance.

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In The Soldier's Two Bodies, James M. Greene investigates an overlooked genre of early American literature- the Revolutionary War veteran narrative- showing that it by turns both promotes and critiques a notion of military heroism as the source of U.S. sovereignty. Personal narratives by veterans of the American Revolution indicate that soldiers in the United States have been represented in two contrasting ways from the nation's first days: as heroic symbols of the body politic and as human beings whose sufferings are neglected by their country. Published from 1779 through the late 1850s, narrative accounts of Revolutionary War veterans' past service called for recognition from contemporary audiences, inviting readers to understand the war as a moment of violence central to the founding of the nation. Yet, as Greene reveals, these calls for recognition at the same time underscored how many veterans felt overlooked and excluded from the sovereign power they fought to establish. Although such narratives stem from a discourse that supports centralized, continental nationalism, they disrupt stable notions of a unified American people by highlighting those left behind. Greene discusses several well-known examples of the genre, including narratives from Ethan Allen, Joseph Plumb Martin, and Deborah Sampson, along with Herman Melville's fictional adaptation of the life of Israel Potter. Additional chapters focus on accounts of postwar frontier actions, including narratives collected by Hugh Henry Brackenridge that voice concerns over populist violence, along with stranger narratives like those of Isaac Hubbell and James Roberts, which register as fantastic imitations of the genre commenting on antebellum racial politics. With attention to questions of historical context and political ideology, Greene charts the process by which veteran narratives promote exception, violence, and autonomy, while also encouraging restraint, sacrifice, and collectivity. Revolutionary War veteran narratives offer no easy solutions to the appropriation of veterans' lives within military nationalism and sovereign violence. But by bringing forward the paradox inherent in the figure of the U.S. soldier, the genre invites considerations of how to reimagine those representations. Drawing attention to paradoxes presented by the memory of the American Revolution, The Soldier's Two Bodies locates the origins of a complicated history surrounding the representation of veterans in U.S. politics and culture.

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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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In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites. Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies. States' rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power. Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality among whites, favoured radical states' rights, and supported slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralised guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states.Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct assistance from French soldiers in Mexico.Zvengrowski's important new interpretation of Confederate ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C. Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point's superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.

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Uses a design perspective to explore how monuments to the Confederacy speak to regionalism, racist political agendas, and residual collective pain. Above all, Empty Pedestals lifts up the voices of people who have confronted hateful narratives and devised strategies that stand up to, and apart from, old mythologies.

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Killed in action at the bloody Battle of Shiloh, Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston stands as the highest-ranking American military officer to die in combat. His unexpected demise had cascading negative consequences for the South's war effort, as his absence created a void in adequate leadership in the years that followed. In The Iron Dice of Battle, noted Civil War historian Timothy B. Smith reexamines Johnston's life and death, offering remarkable insights into this often-contradictory figure.As a commander, Johnston frequently faced larger and better-armed Union forces, dramatically shaping his battlefield decisions and convincing him that victory could only be attained by taking strategic risks while fighting. The final wager came while leading his army at Shiloh in April 1862. During a desperate gambit to turn the tide of battle, Johnston charged to the front of the Confederate line to direct his troops and fell mortally wounded after sustaining enemy fire.The first work to survey the general's career in detail in nearly sixty years, The Iron Dice of Battle builds on recent scholarship to provide a new and incisive assessment of Johnston's life, his Confederate command, and the effect his death had on the course of the Civil War in the West.

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Po'Boy tells the story of how a humble sandwich became a symbol of New Orleans culture, history, and cuisine. Invented to help feed a crowd of out-of-work individuals in New Orleans's streetcar industry, the po'boy is a submarine-like sandwich served on French bread, with common fillings that include fried seafood, roast beef and gravy ("debris"), and hot sausage. Rich with historical detail, Po'Boy welcomes readers into the world of the city's most iconic sandwich.

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From its looming above-ground cemeteries to the ghosts believed to haunt its stately homes, New Orleans is a city deeply entwined with death, the undead, and the supernatural. The reasons behind New Orleans's reputation as America's most haunted city are numerous. Its location near the mouth of the Mississippi River grants it a liminal status between water and land, while its Old World architecture and lush, moss-covered oak trees lend it an eerie beauty. Complementing the city's mysterious landscape, spiritual beliefs and practices from Native American, African, African American, Caribbean, and European cultures mingle in a unique ferment of the paranormal. An extremely high death rate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a long history of enslavement and oppression have also produced fertile soil for stories of the undead. Focusing on three manifestations of the supernatural in New Orleans--Voodoo, ghosts, and vampires--Robin Roberts argues that the paranormal gives voice to the voiceless, including victims of racism and oppression, thus encouraging the living not to repeat the injustices of the past.

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The Absinthe Frappé examines the history of absinthe, its origins, and its influences, culminating in the story of the iconic New Orleans cocktail. Marielle Songy reveals how bartender Cayetano Ferrér invented the concoction and delves into the early days of the drink and its first home, the Old Absinthe House in the Crescent City. She explores the ban on absinthe in the United States and Europe and the misguided reasoning behind it, all in the context of New Orleans's response to national Prohibition more broadly. Finally, Songy discusses the lifting of the restrictions on absinthe in 2007, a move largely spearheaded by New Orleans scientist and master distiller Theodore Breaux, who dispelled long-held notions that the Green Fairy invariably drove its connoisseurs to madness.

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Founded in 1917, Paramount Records incongruously was one of several homegrown record labels of a Wisconsin chair-making company. The company pinned no outsized hopes on Paramount. Its founders knew nothing of the music business, and they had arrived at the scheme of producing records only to drive sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing.Lacking the resources and the interest to compete for top talent, Paramount's earliest recordings gained little foothold with the listening public. On the threshold of bankruptcy, the label embarked on a new business plan: selling the music of Black artists to Black audiences. It was a wildly successful move, with Paramount eventually garnering many of the biggest-selling titles in the "race records" era. Inadvertently, the label accomplished what others could not, making blues, jazz, and folk music performed by Black artists a popular and profitable genre. Paramount featured a deep roster of legendary performers, including Louis Armstrong, Charley Patton, Ethel Waters, Son House, Fletcher Henderson, Skip James, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, King Oliver, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Scott Blackwood's The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records is the story of happenstance. But it is also a tale about the sheer force of the Great Migration and the legacy of the music etched into the shellacked grooves of a 78 rpm record. With Paramount Records, Black America found its voice. Through creative nonfiction, Blackwood brings to life the gifted artists and record producers who used Paramount to revolutionize American music. Felled by the Great Depression, the label stopped recording in 1932, leaving a legacy of sound pressed into cheap 78s that is among the most treasured and influential in American history.

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In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women's rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld's Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African diaspora overlapped.Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.

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Walt Whitman's short stint in New Orleans during the spring of 1848 was a crucial moment of literary and personal development, with many celebrated poems from Leaves of Grass showing its influence. Walt Whitman's New Orleans is the first book dedicated to republishing his writings about the Crescent City, including numerous previously unknown pieces. Often spending his afternoons strolling through the vibrant city with his brother in tow, the young Whitman translated his impressions into short prose sketches that cataloged curious sights, captured typical characters one might meet on the levee, and joked about the strangeness of urban life. Including the first complete run of a fictional, multipart series titled "Sketches of the Sidewalks and Levee," Walt Whitman's New Orleans pairs his glimpses of the city with historical illustrations, supplementary texts, detailed annotations, and an introduction by editor Stefan Schöberlein that offers new insights on the poet's southern sojourn. Whitmanites, history enthusiasts, and lovers of New Orleans will find much to treasure in these humorous, evocative scenes of antebellum city life.

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Help Me, Information is propelled by the speed and motion of the poems that define earlier acclaimed books by David Kirby, poems that move the way the mind does on a good day, puddle-jumping from one topic to another and then coming in for a nice soft landing. Colloquial in tone, balancing narrative breadth with precise detail, Kirby's poetry displays his voracious curiosity about history, science, literature, and popular culture. Yet here he also reinvents himself with poems that recall the compactness of Jack Gilbert, the sweep of Allen Ginsberg, and the introspection of Frank O'Hara.Help Me, Information presents a fresh Kirby, familiar yet new.

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An essential reference guide to one of New Orleans's most iconic Uptown neighborhoods, New Orleans Architecture: Volume IX documents the remarkable architectural history of the former city of Carrollton, once the seat of Jefferson Parish and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.Following the format of previous volumes in the series, Robert J. Cangelosi Jr. divides the study into three sections. He begins in the early eighteenth century by chronicling the area's development as one of the many upriver communities just west of New Orleans. Its fields and plantations afforded early homesteaders tillable farmland and easy access to the Mississippi River. Later, during the War of 1812, American troops led by William Carroll encamped there, and the area was subsequently named for the general. In 1831, developers purchased the land, subdivided it, and began construction of a road and a canal linking the area to New Orleans. Local officials reorganized Carrollton in 1845 - by then a village of about 1,000 residents - as a town in Jefferson Parish, and in 1859 a charter officially incorporated it as a city. Just fifteen years later, the City of New Orleans annexed Carrollton - now replete with schools, public gardens, and brick-paved streets - as the Seventh Municipal District.The volume's second section consists of a ""Building Index,"" which gives the original owners, dates of construction, costs, designers, and builders for many of the structures erected in Carrollton since its founding. In the ""Selective Architectural Inventory,"" the book's final section, Cangelosi explores the history of nearly 420 historic homes and buildings in Carrollton, and shares thumbnail photographs, detailed sales records, and information on a variety of architectural styles.New Orleans Architecture: Volume IX serves as a valuable resource for the city's Historic District Landmark Commission and the State Historic Preservation Office, as well as home owners, real estate agents, guides, historians, and tourists.

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The West Bank has been a vital part of greater New Orleans since the city's inception, serving as its breadbasket, foundry, shipbuilder, railroad terminal, train manufacturer, and even livestock hub. At one time it was the Gulf South's St. Louis, boasting a diversified industrial sector as well as a riverine, mercantilist, and agricultural economy. Today the mostly suburban West Bank is proud but not pretentious, pleasant if not prominent, and a distinct, affordable alternative to the more famous neighborhoods of the East Bank. Richard Campanella is the first to examine the West Bank holistically, as a legitimate subregion with its own story to tell. No other part of greater New Orleans has more diverse yet deeply rooted populations: folks who speak in local accents, who exhibit longstanding cultural traits, and, in some cases, who maintain family ownership of lands held since antebellum times- even as immigrants settle here in growing numbers. Campanella demonstrates that West Bankers have had great agency in their own place ­-making, and he challenges the notion that their story is subsidiary to a more important narrative across the river. The West Bank of Greater New Orleans is not a traditional history, nor a cultural history, but rather a historical geography, a spatial explanation of how the West Bank's landscape formed: its terrain, environment, land use, jurisdictions, waterways, industries, infrastructure, neighborhoods, and settlement patterns, past and present. The book explores the drivers, conditions, and power structures behind those landscape transformations, using custom maps, aerial images, photographic montages, and a detailed historical timeline to help tell that complex geographical story. As Campanella shows, there is no ""greater New Orleans"" without its cross ­-river component. The West Bank is an essential part of this remarkable metropolis.

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Civil War Supply and Strategy stands as a sweeping examination of the decisive link between the distribution of provisions to soldiers and the strategic movement of armies during the Civil War. Award-winning historian Earl J. Hess reveals how that dynamic served as the key to success, especially for the Union army as it undertook bold offensives striking far behind Confederate lines. How generals and their subordinates organized military resources to provide food for both men and animals under their command, he argues, proved essential to Union victory.The Union army developed a powerful logistical capability that enabled it to penetrate deep into Confederate territory and exert control over select regions of the South. Logistics and supply empowered Union offensive strategy but limited it as well; heavily dependent on supply lines, road systems, preexisting railroad lines, and natural waterways, Union strategy worked far better in the more developed Upper South. Union commanders encountered unique problems in the Deep South, where needed infrastructure was more scarce. While the Mississippi River allowed Northern armies to access the region along a narrow corridor and capture key cities and towns along its banks, the dearth of rail lines nearly stymied William T. Sherman's advance to Atlanta. In other parts of the Deep South, the Union army relied on massive strategic raids to destroy resources and propel its military might into the heart of the Confederacy. As Hess's study shows, from the perspective of maintaining food supply and moving armies, there existed two main theaters of operation, north and south, that proved just as important as the three conventional eastern, western, and Trans-Mississippi theaters. Indeed, the conflict in the Upper South proved so different from that in the Deep South that the ability of Federal officials to negotiate the logistical complications associated with army mobility played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the war.

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Over the summer of 1821, a cash-strapped John James Audubon worked as a tutor at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana's rural West Feliciana Parish. This move initiated a profound change in direction for the struggling artist. Oakley's woods teemed with life, galvanizing Audubon to undertake one of the most extraordinary endeavors in the annals of art: a comprehensive pictorial record of America's birds. That summer, Audubon began what would eventually become his four-volume opus, Birds of America.In A Summer of Birds, Danny Heitman recounts the season that shaped Audubon's destiny, sorting facts from romance to give an intimate view of the world's most famous bird artist. A new preface marks the two-hundredth anniversary of that eventful interlude, reflecting on Audubon's enduring legacy among artists, aesthetes, and nature lovers in Louisiana and around the world.

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In North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715- 1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," "mixed- ­bloods," or simply "free people of color." From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted- praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer's innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements- with whites placing themselves above persons of color- those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included.North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715- 1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures- all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever ­-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

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This book explores the intertwined histories of Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Although separated by an ocean, both cities were founded during the early French imperial expansion of the Atlantic world. Both became important port cities of their own continents, the Atlantic world as a whole, and the African diaspora. The slave trade not only played a crucial role in the demographic and economic growth of Saint-Louis and New Orleans, but also directly connected the two cities. The Company of the Indies ran the Senegambia slave-trading posts and the Mississippi colony simultaneously from 1719 to 1731. By examining the linked histories of these cities over the longue durée, this edited collection shows the crucial role they played in integrating the peoples of the Atlantic world. The essays also illustrate how the interplay of imperialism, colonialism, and slaving that defined the early Atlantic world operated and evolved differently on both sides of the ocean. The chapters in part one, Negotiating Slavery and Freedom, highlight the centrality of the institution of slavery in the urban societies of Saint-Louis and New Orleans from their foundation to the second half of the nineteenth century. Part two, Elusive Citizenship, explores how the notions of nationality, citizenship, and subjecthood- as well as the rights or lack of rights associated with them- were mobilized, manipulated, or negotiated at key moments in the history of each city. Part three, Mythic Persistence, examines the construction, reproduction, and transformation of myths and popular imagination in the colonial and postcolonial cities. It is here, in the imagined past, that New Orleans and Saint-Louis most clearly mirror one another. The essays in this section offer two examples of how historical realities are simplified, distorted, or obliterated to minimize the violence of the cities' common slave and colonial past in order to promote a romanticized present. With editors from three continents and contributors from around the world, this work is truly an international collaboration.

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Founded in the summer of 1972 by a few friends as a modest celebration, the Southern Decadence festival has since grown into one of New Orleans's largest annual tourist events.The multiday extravaganza features street parties, drag contests, dancing, drinking, and bead tosses, culminating with a boisterous parade through the French Quarter. With over 200,000 participants- predominantly LGBT+- these unbridled, pre- Labor Day festivities now generate millions of dollars in revenue.Howard Philips Smith and Frank Perez's Southern Decadence in New Orleans brings together an astounding array of materials to provide the first comprehensive, historical look at Southern Decadence. In an engaging account spanning five decades, the authors combine a trove of rare memorabilia from the event's founders, early photographs and film stills, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews with longtime participants, a list of all the parades and grand marshals, as well as reproductions of early Southern Decadence invitations. Throughout, the authors explore the pivotal moments and public perceptions related to the festival- including the myths and conjecture that often inaccurately characterized it- and provide an in-depth narrative detailing how a small party in the Faubourg Tremé grew into a worldwide destination predominantly for gay men.Lauded by city leaders as the second-most profitable festival in New Orleans (outshone only by Mardi Gras), Southern Decadence emanates an air of frivolity that masks its enormous impact on the culture and economy of the Crescent City. But with such growth comes the challenge of maintaining the original spirit of camaraderie while managing expanding administrative and logistical responsibilities. Southern Decadence in New Orleans serves as a historical record that helps ensure the future of the celebration remains forever linked to the joyous impulse of its humble beginnings.

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In a career that spanned half a century, Caroline Durieux, a master lithographer, created prints that chronicled the beauty and absurdity of academia, New Orleans's famed Carnival season, characters observed from everyday life, and more. Caroline Durieux: Lithographs of the Thirties and Forties brings together fifty-eight images that reveal her keen understanding of both the comic and tragic aspects of satire. These remarkable works, with accompanying text by art historian Richard Cox, establish her place within the tradition of American satirical art. A new foreword by art historian Sally Main and archivist Susan Tucker considers Durieux's life and influence from her main periods of activity through the present day.Born in New Orleans in 1896, Durieux spent several years with her husband in Cuba before the two settled in Mexico City for a decade, and Latin American settings inspired some of her earliest forays into lithography. Her time in Mexico also brought her into contact with Diego Rivera, whose enthusiasm for her work brought her national and international attention. When Durieux returned to the United States in 1936, she taught art classes and held several positions with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), where she championed local artists and oversaw the creation of an index of Louisiana art and numerous public art projects. The prints collected in this volume showcase the artist's humor as well as her keen eye for the scenes and people she encountered in Louisiana and abroad.Originally published in 1977 and long unavailable, Caroline Durieux: Lithographs of the Thirties and Forties finally returns to print.

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Maria Isabel Medina's chronicle of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law examines the prominent Jesuit institution across its hundred-year history, from its founding in 1914 through the first decade of the twenty-first century. With a mission to make the legal profession attainable to Catholics, and other working-class persons, Loyola's law school endured the hardships of two world wars, the Great Depression, the tumult of the civil rights era, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to emerge as a leader in legal education in the state. Exploring the history of the college within a larger examination of the legal profession in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, Medina provides details on Loyola's practical and egalitarian approach to education. As a result of the school's principled focus, Loyola was the first law school in the state to offer a law school clinic, develop a comprehensive program of legal-skills training, and to voluntarily integrate African Americans into the student body.The transformative milestones of Loyola University New Orleans College of Law parallel pivotal points in the history of the Crescent City, demonstrating how local culture and environment can contribute to the longevity of an academic institution and making Loyola University New Orleans College of Law a valuable contribution to the study of legal education.

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John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870) achieved a multidimensional career as a successful novelist, historian, and politician. He published widely and represented his district in the Maryland legislature before being elected to Congress several times and serving as secretary of the navy during the Fillmore administration. He devoted much of his life to the American Whig party and campaigned zealously for Henry Clay during his multiple runs for president. His friends in literary circles included Charles Dickens, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. According to biographer Andrew Black, scholars from various fields have never completely captured this broadly talented antebellum figure, with literary critics ignoring Kennedy's political work, historians overlooking his literary achievements, and neither exploring their close interrelationship. In fact, Black argues, literature and politics were inseparable for Kennedy, as his literary productions were infused with the principles and beliefs that coalesced into the Whig party in the 1830s and led to its victory over Jacksonian Democrats the following decade. Black's comprehensive biography amends this fractured scholarship, employing Kennedy's published work and other writing to investigate the culture of the Whig party itself.Using Kennedy's best-known novel, the enigmatic Swallow Barn, or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), Black illustrates how the author grappled unsuccessfully with race and slavery. The novel's unstable narrative and dissonant content reflect the fatal indecisiveness both of its author and his party in dealing with these volatile issues. Black further argues that it was precisely this failure that caused the political collapse of the Whigs and paved the way for the Civil War.

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Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial equality to the forefront of the nation's attention. Beyond its repercussions for the educational system, the decision also heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national identity. ""Brown v. Board"" and the Transformation of American Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision.Through the lens of three cultural ""first responders,"" Ben Keppel tracks the creation of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize--winning studies of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country, helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black. Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle, family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support.Together, the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal decision.

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