Search results for ""Louisiana State University Press""

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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The Limits of Love: The Lives of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen provides a candid look at two illustrious people who tested the capacity—and the limits—of marriage. The Lawrences come alive not as simple quarreling travelers, nor as blissful domestic partners, but as complex personalities who experimented with marriage to see if it would fulfill their needs. Their antagonisms and their sexual experiences informed Lawrence's fearless novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. Both works also tested the boundaries of public taste and faced harsh receptions.The cost of the Lawrences' strong but unstable marriage was high. Despite periods of happiness and peace, angry clashes meant separations and uneasy agreements to repair the marital intimacy when it cracked. Fractures of 1916, 1919, 1923, and 1926 healed slowly and with difficulty. In Lawrence's most calculated and famous work, Lady Chatterley's Lover, he successfully coded their marital stress and, full of rage, fused two stories of failed marriages.Drawing on many unpublished and recently discovered letters, The Limits of Love offers readers a detailed reconstruction of two complicated lives, written with narrative speed and a forceful style, filled with vivid interpretations of Lawrence's work, and conveying deep sympathy for people living outside established norms. This new dual biography, based on years of research by Michael Squires, captures the essence of Lawrence and Frieda, making the couple real, alive, and accessible.

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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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Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp addresses the vibrant natural, cultural, and social history of a north Louisiana swamp. Kelby Ouchley grew up near Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp, and he later spent much of his professional life as a wildlife biologist and naturalist overseeing the national wildlife refuge created from much of the area. His deep personal and professional connections to the landscape give him valuable insight into the enormous changes that have struck the swamp over the last century and the reasons behind this transformation. In this fascinating narrative, Ouchley offers a kaleidoscopic view of Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp that reveals its unique past and distinctive flora, fauna, and people. Although these are stories of a particular swamp, they tell us much about issues facing other wetlands, as well as prairies, mountains, and deserts, when viewed through an ecological, social, and historical lens. Ouchley aims to foster an awareness of the environmental impacts of human decisions that encourages readers to consider ecological choices in their daily lives. The result is a work that presents an intimate and multilayered natural history of Bayou D'Arbonne Swamp that extends beyond the edges of the ever-changing Louisiana wetland, informing the environmental history of Louisiana, conservation, and ecological change.

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Drumsville! The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat traces the history of drums and drumming in the Crescent City, exploring more than three centuries of the instrument and the art form that transformed New Orleans into the musical powerhouse it is today. Created as a companion to the New Orleans Jazz Museum exhibit of the same name, Drumsville! examines the drummer's role in the evolution of brass bands, Black masking Indians, traditional and modern jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and funk.

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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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Deceptively straightforward and subtly pyrotechnic, the poems in Hannah Sanghee Park's debut collection captivate with their wordplay at first glance, then give rise to opportunities for extended reflection. ""If / truth be told, I can't be true,"" she writes, but her startling juxtapositions of sound and meaning belie that claim, necessitating a search for the truth behind her semantic games. Here are dozens of brief sentences that can serve as epigrams to undermine our ordinary ways of seeing, as Park's playfully deployed puns recall the sly paradoxes of Oscar Wilde. The Same-Different ranges from the wonders of the natural world to close human relationships, occasioning the kind of explorations offered in ""And A Lie"": ""The asking was askance. / And the tell all told. / So then, in tandem // Anathema, and anthem.

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Perhaps no conflict in American history is more important yet more overlooked and misunderstood than the War of 1812. Begun by President James Madison after decades of humiliating British trade interference and impressment of American sailors, the war in many ways was the second battle for United States independence.At the climax of the war -- inspired by the defeat of Napoleon in early 1814 and the perceived illegality of the Louisiana Purchase -- the British devised a plan to launch a three-pronged attack against the northern, eastern, and southern U.S. borders. Concealing preparations for this strike by engaging in negotiations in Ghent, Britain meanwhile secretly issued orders to seize New Orleans and wrest control of the Mississippi and the lands west of the river. They further instructed British commander General Edward Pakenham not to cease his attack if he heard rumors of a peace treaty. Great Britain even covertly installed government officials within military units with the intention of immediately taking over administrative control once the territory was conquered.According to author Ronald J. Drez, the British strategy and the successful defense of New Orleans through the leadership of General Andrew Jackson affirm the serious implications of this climatic -battle. Far from being simply an unnecessary epilogue to the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans firmly secured for the United States the territory acquired through the Louisiana Purchase.Through the use of primary sources, Drez provides a deeper understanding of Britain's objectives, and The War of 1812, Conflict and Deception offers a compelling account of this pivotal moment in American history.

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The final volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the Confederacy through the completion of his two monumental works on the history of the Confederate States of America. In the first, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), Davis sought to recast the Confederacy as a just and moral nation that was constitutionally correct in standing up for its rights. Himself the subject of heated debates about why the Confederacy lost, Davis also used the book to castigate Confederate government and military officials who he believed had failed the cause. Later, A Short History of the Confederate States (1890) attempted to burnish the image of the former Confederacy and to refute accusations of intentional mistreatment of Union prisoners. While completing these books, Davis attended and spoke at numerous Confederate memorial services and monument dedications, all the while waging a bitter feud with two of his former top generals-Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard-over the reasons for the fall of the Confederacy. In late 1889, having returned to New Orleans from a trip to his plantation, Brierfield, Davis succumbed to pneumonia. His funeral procession attracted an estimated 150,000 mourners, a testament to the lasting popularity of the Confederacy's only president. In volume 14 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis, the editors have drawn from over one hundred manuscript repositories and private collections, in addition to numerous published sources, to offer a compelling portrait of Davis over the last decade of his life.

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A groundbreaking new study of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War, Diplomacy at the Brink argues for a reevaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy toward allies and enemies alike. Contrary to his reputation as a level-headed moderate, the Eisenhower who emerges in David M. Watry's exhaustively researched book is a conservative ideologue, a leader whose aggressively anti-Communist and anticolonialist foreign policies represented a major shift away from the containment policy of the Truman presidency. Watry contends that Eisenhower worked closely with John Foster Dulles to engage in aggressive brinksmanship that diametrically opposed Winston Churchill's diplomacy of ""peaceful coexistence."" At a time when British economic interests favored cooperation with China, Eisenhower planned nuclear war against it; when Anthony Eden considered Gamal Abdel Nasser a Soviet agent and invaded Egypt, Eisenhower supported Arab nationalism and used economic and political blackmail to force Britain to withdraw. Such stances fractured the ""special relationship"" between America and Great Britain and played a vital role in the dissolution of the British Empire. Watry's thorough examination of the important clash of U.S.-U.K. foreign policy demonstrates that America's new anti-colonial policies and the unilateral use of American power against perceived Communist threats put Eisenhower and Dulles on a collision course with Churchill and Eden that rocked the world.

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Offering new insights into Florida's position within the cultural legacy of the South, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami explores the long fight for civil rights in one of the country's most popular tourist destinations. Chanelle N. Rose examines how the sustained tourism and rapid demographic changes that characterized Miami for much of the twentieth century undermined constructions of blackness and whiteness that remained more firmly entrenched in other parts of the South. The convergence of cultural practices in Miami from the American South and North, the Caribbean, and Latin America created a border community that never fit comfortably within the paradigm of the Deep South experience. As white civic elites scrambled to secure the city's burgeoning reputation as the ""Gateway to the Americas,"" an influx of Spanish-speaking migrants and tourists had a transformative effect on conventional notions of blackness. Business owners and city boosters resisted arbitrary racial distinctions and even permitted dark-skinned Latinos access to public accommodations that were otherwise off limits to nonwhites in the South. At the same time, civil-rights activists waged a fierce battle against the antiblack discrimination and violence that lay beneath the public image of Miami as a place relatively tolerant of racial diversity. In its exploration of regional distinctions, transnational forces, and the effect of both on the civil rights battle, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami complicates the black/white binary and offers a new way of understanding the complexity of racial traditions and white supremacy in southern metropolises like Miami.

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The food markets of Barcelona host thousands of customers daily, from tourists eager to sample fresh fruits and grilled seafood to neighborhood cooks in search of high-quality ingredients. While other countries experienced major shifts away from the public-market model in the twentieth century, Barcelona's food markets remained fundamental to the city's identity, economy, and culture. Montserrat Miller's Feeding Barcelona, 1714-1975 examines the causes behind the extraordinary vibrancy and tenacity of the Barcelonan market system. Miller argues that recurrent revolutionary uprisings in Barcelona, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, forced ongoing collaboration between the public and private sectors to ensure adequate and effective food distribution. Municipal support permitted small-scale food sellers in Barcelona to survive in a period more commonly characterized by increasing capitalization in food retail, while the importance of food markets to Barcelona's social networks enhanced vendors' ability to recognize and adapt to changing customer demands. In addition, a high number of stalls owned by women contributed both to the financial well-being of vendor families and to the sociability patterns that placed neighborhood food markets at the center of daily life in the city. The shared commitment of vendors, shoppers, and government officials to a market model of food sales created the lasting and unique market system that persists in Barcelona to this day. Drawing from extensive archival research and numerous interviews with individuals at all levels of the market system, Feeding Barcelona, 1714-1975 is the first detailed history of the historical and social influences that create urban food markets.

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The Union army's overwhelming vote for Abraham Lincoln's reelection in 1864 has led many Civil War scholars to conclude that the soldiers supported the Republican Party and its effort to abolish slavery. In Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan W. White challenges this reigning paradigm in Civil War historiography, arguing instead that the soldier vote in the presidential election of 1864 is not a reliable index of the army's ideological motivation or political sentiment. Although 78 percent of the soldiers' votes were cast for Lincoln, White contends that this was not wholly due to a political or social conversion to the Republican Party. Rather, he argues, historians have ignored mitigating factors such as voter turnout, intimidation at the polls, and how soldiers voted in nonpresidential elections in 1864.While recognizing that many soldiers changed their views on slavery and emancipation during the war, White suggests that a considerable number still rejected the Republican platform, and that many who voted for Lincoln disagreed with his views on slavery. He likewise explains that many northerners considered a vote for the Democratic ticket as treasonous and an admission of defeat.Using previously untapped court-martial records from the National Archives, as well as manuscript collections from across the country, White convincingly revises many commonly held assumptions about the Civil War era and provides a deeper understanding of the Union Army.

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The initial confrontation between Union general Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Virginia during the Overland Campaign has not until recently received the same degree of scrutiny as other Civil War battles. The first round of combat between the two renowned generals spanned about six weeks in May and early June 1864. The major skirmishes- Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor- rivaled any other key engagement in the war. While the strength and casualties in Grant's army remain uncontested, historians know much less about Lee's army. Nonetheless, the prevailing narrative depicts Confederates as outstripped nearly two to one, and portrays Grant suffering losses at a rate nearly double that of Lee. As a result, most Civil War scholars contend that the campaign proved a clear numerical victory for Lee but a tactical triumph for Grant. Questions about the power of Lee's army stem mainly from poor record keeping by the Confederates as well as an inordinate number of missing or lost battle reports. The complexity of the Overland Campaign, which consisted of several smaller engagements in addition to the three main clashes, led to considerable historic uncertainty regarding Lee's army. Significant doubts persist about the army's capability at the commencement of the drive, the amount of reinforcements received, and the total of casualties sustained during the entire campaign and at each of the major battles. In Lee's Army during the Overland Campaign, Alfred C. Young III addresses this deficiency by providing for the first time accurate information regarding the Confederate side throughout the conflict. The results challenge prevailing assumptions, showing clearly that Lee's army stood far larger in strength and size and suffered considerably higher casualties than previously believed.

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Rice University, one of America's preeminent institutions of higher education, grew out of the vision, direction, and leadership of one man: Edgar Odell Lovett (1871--1957). University Builder is the fascinating story of this extraordinary educator and the unique school he created. Widely acknowledged, almost from its founding in 1912, as one of America's best universities, Rice is distinguished as both the smallest and the youngest institution in the top tier of American universities. In telling the tale of Lovett and his innovative, enduring vision for Rice, John Boles provides both a compelling biographical narrative and a refreshing new view of American higher education in the first half of the twentieth century.Lovett was not a Texan; he was not even a southerner. Rather, with two Ph.D.'s in hand, he was a rising star at Princeton University when the trustees of the newly founded Rice Institute--chartered in 1891 by wealthy Houston merchant William Marsh Rice--called him in 1907 to be the school's first president. Working with a significant endowment, a vague charter, a supportive board, and a visionary's gift for planning, Lovett set out on a fact-finding tour of educational institutions around the globe. He transformed the idea of the Institute into a complete university, one that emphasized research as much as teaching and aspired to world-class status. He sought the best architect available to design the campus, lured distinguished faculty from leading universities across the globe to Texas, and constructed a far-reaching vision of a small, carefully planned, elite university that incorporated the most advanced educational practices and shaped Rice's development for the next century. Lovett served as president of Rice for nearly forty years, proving himself to be an exemplary and charismatic leader who inspired two generations of students. He was the creator of Rice University in practically every way. Indeed, perhaps no other American university has been so shaped by its founder's vision. Boles's exceptional account of Lovett's remarkable academic achievement is a vital contribution to the legacy of Rice University and an important addition to the historiography of education in the early twentieth-century South.

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Emory University professor Sally Wolff has carried on a fifty-year tradition of leading students on expeditions to ""Faulkner country"" in and around Oxford, Mississippi. Not long ago, she decided to invite alumni on one of these field trips. One response to the invitation surprised her: ""I can't go on the trip. But I knew William Faulkner."" They were the words of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, and in talking with Wolff he revealed that as a child in the 1930s and 1940s he did indeed know Faulkner quite well. His father and Faulkner maintained a close friendship for many years, going back to their shared childhood, but the fact of their friendship has been unrecognised because the two men saw much less of each other after the early years of their marriages. In Ledgers of History, Wolff recounts her conversations with Dr. Francisco - known to Faulkner as ""Little Eddie"" - and reveals startling sources of inspiration for Faulkner's most famous works.Dr. Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his family's ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulkner's fiction.Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Francisco's great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leak's life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home. During his visits over the course of decades, Francisco recalls, Faulkner spent many hours poring over these volumes, often taking notes. Wolff has discovered that Faulkner apparently drew some of the most important material in several of his greatest works, including Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, at least in part from the diary.Through Dr. Francisco's vivid childhood recollections, Ledgers of History offers a compelling portrait of the future Nobel Laureate near the midpoint of his legendary career and also charts a significant discovery that will inevitably lead to revisions in historical and critical scholarship on Faulkner and his writings.

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In 1836 Benjamin Drake, a midwestern writer of popular sketches for newspapers of the day, introduced his readers to a new and distinctly American rascal who rode the steamboats up and down the Mississippi and other western waterways - the riverboat gambler. These men, he recorded, ""dress with taste and elegance; carry gold chronometers in their pockets; and swear with the most genteel precision.... Every where throughout the valley, these mistletoe gentry are called by the original, if not altogether classic, cognomen of 'Black-legs.'"" In Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men, Thomas Ruys Smith collects nineteenth-century stories, sketches, and book excerpts by a gallery of authors to create a comprehensive collection of writings about the riverboat gambler. Long an iconic figure in American myth and popular culture but, strangely, one that has never until now received a book-length treatment, the Mississippi River gambler was a favourite character throughout the nineteenth century - one often rich with moral ambiguities that remain unresolved to this day.In the absorbing fictional and nonfictional accounts of high stakes and sudden reversals of fortune found in the pages of Smith's book, the voices of canonized writers such as William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, and, of course, Mark Twain hold prominent positions. But they mingle seamlessly with lesser-known pieces such as an excerpt from Edward Willett's sensationalistic dime novel Flush Fred's Full Hand, raucous sketches by anonymous Old Southwestern humorists from the Spirit of the Times, and colourful accounts by now nearly forgotten authors such as Daniel R. Hundley and George W. Featherstonhaugh. Smith puts the twenty-eight selections in perspective with an Introduction that thoroughly explores the history and myth surrounding this endlessly fascinating American cultural icon. While the riverboat gambler may no longer ply his trade along the Mississippi, Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men makes clear the ways in which he still operates quite successfully in the American imagination.

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In 2018, while teaching her kids to swim and working on urban river restoration projects, Hannah S. Palmer began a journal of social encounters with water. As she found herself dangling her feet in a seemingly all-white swimming pool, she started to worry about how her young sons would learn to swim.

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Virginians dominate the early history of the United States, with Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Patrick Henry, George Mason, George Wythe, and John Marshall figuring prominently in that narrative. Fellow Virginian Spencer Roane (1762-1822), an influential jurist and political thinker, was in many ways their equal. Roane is nonetheless mostly absent in accounts of early America. The lack of interest in Roane is remarkable since he was the philosophical leader of the Jeffersonians, architect of states' rights doctrine, a legislator, essayist, and, for twenty-seven years, justice of the Virginia Supreme Court. He was the son-in-law of Henry, a confidant of Jefferson, founder of the influential Richmond Enquirer, and head of the ""Richmond Junto."" Roane's opinions established judicial review of legislative acts ten years before Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall did the same in Marbury v. Madison. Roane also brought down Virginia's state-sponsored church. His descent into historical twilight is even more curious given his fierce criticism-both from the bench and in the Richmond Enquirer-of Marshall's nationalistic decisions. Indeed, the debate between these two judges is perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of federalism outside of the arguments that raged over the ratification of the United States Constitution. In Irreconcilable Founders, David Johnson uses Roane's long-lasting conflict with Marshall as ballast for the first-ever biography of this highly influential but largely forgotten justice and political theorist. Because Roane's legal opinions gave way to those of Marshall, historians have tended to either dismiss him or cast him as little more than an annoying gadfly. Equally to blame for his obscurity is the comparative inaccessibility of Roane's life: no single archive houses his papers, no scholars have systematically reviewed his legal opinions, and no one has methodically examined his essays. Bringing these and other disparate sources together for the first time, Johnson precisely limns Roane's career, personality, and philosophy. He also synthesizes the judge's wide-ranging jurisprudence and analyzes his predictions about the dangers of unchecked federal power and an activist Supreme Court. Although contemporary jurists and politicians disregarded Roane's opinions, many in today's political and legal arenas are unknowingly echoing his views with increasing frequency, making this reappraisal of his life and reassessment of his opinions timely and relevant.

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In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny- invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide- to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in Loving Ophelia Is, ""love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind."" A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother's struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world.

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In the seventy-three succinct essays gathered in The Enduring Civil War, celebrated historian Gary W. Gallagher highlights the complexity and richness of the war, from its origins to its memory, as topics for study, contemplation, and dispute. He places contemporary understanding of the Civil War, both academic and general, in conversation with testimony from those in the Union and the Confederacy who experienced and described it, investigating how mid-nineteenth-century perceptions align with, or deviate from, current ideas regarding the origins, conduct, and aftermath of the war. The tension between history and memory forms a theme throughout the essays, underscoring how later perceptions about the war often took precedence over historical reality in the minds of many Americans. The array of topics Gallagher addresses is striking. He examines notable books and authors, both Union and Confederate, military and civilian, famous and lesser known. He discusses historians who, though their names have receded with time, produced works that remain pertinent in terms of analysis or information. He comments on conventional interpretations of events and personalities, challenging, among other things, commonly held notions about Gettysburg and Vicksburg as decisive turning points, Ulysses S. Grant as a general who profligately wasted Union manpower, the Gettysburg Address as a watershed that turned the war from a fight for Union into one for Union and emancipation, and Robert E. Lee as an old-fashioned general ill-suited to waging a modern mid-nineteenth-century war. Gallagher interrogates recent scholarly trends on the evolving nature of Civil War studies, addressing crucial questions about chronology, history, memory, and the new revisionist literature. The format of this provocative and timely collection lends itself to sampling, and readers might start in any of the subject groupings and go where their interests take them.

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Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South. Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Complexities of race, class, and gender remain hidden amid familiar images, catchy slogans, and convenient stories. As the first collection of scholarship that investigates the relationship between drinking and the South, Southern Comforts challenges popular assumptions by examining evocative topics drawn from literature, music, film, city life, and cocktail culture. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate that exaggerated representations of drinking oversimplify the South's relationship to alcohol, in effect absorbing it into narratives of southern exceptionalism that persist to this day. From Edgar Allan Poe to Richard Wright, Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash, Bourbon Street tourism to post-Katrina disaster capitalism and more, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South uncovers the reciprocal relationship between mythologies of drinking and mythologies of region.

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Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."

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