Search results for ""author louise"

The fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is well known, so much so that many scholars rarely question the standard narrative casting the two as foils, with the Great Emancipator inevitably coming out on top over his supposedly feckless commander. In Conflict of Command, acclaimed Civil War historian George C. Rable rethinks that stance, providing a new understanding of the interaction between the president and his leading wartime general by reinterpreting the political aspects of their partnership.Rable pays considerable attention to Lincoln's cabinet, Congress, and newspaper editorials, revealing the role each played in shaping the dealings between the two men. While he surveys McClellan's military campaigns as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Rable focuses on the political fallout of the fighting rather than the tactical details. This broadly conceived approach highlights the army officers and enlisted men who emerged as citizen-soldiers and political actors.Most accounts of the Lincoln-McClellan feud solely examine one of the two individuals, and the vast majority adopt a steadfast pro-Lincoln position. Taking a more neutral view, Rable deftly shows how the relationship between the two developed in a political context and ultimately failed spectacularly, profoundly altering the course of the Civil War itself.

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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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From the stately Gothic Revival and Regency-style houses of Savannah to the majestic, multicolumned plantation homes that punctuate rolling farmlands throughout the state, David King Gleason presents a splendid pictorial record of Georgia's fines pre-Civil War residences. The book begins with the town houses of Savannah, which include such landmark residences as the Andrew Low House, built in 1848 in the style of an early Victorian Renaissance villa, and the imposing Gree-Heldrim House, a Gothic Revival mansion that was the most expensive house built in Savannah prior to the Civil War. Wild Heron, located just south of Savannah on the Little Ogeechee River, is the oldest plantation house still standing in Georgia. A one-and-a-half story farmhouse built in the style of a West India cottage, it is being restored to reflect the period of the early 1800s. Farther to the interior, in the area around Augusta, are such homes as Fruitlands, now the clubhouse of the Augusta national Golf Club; Meadow Garden; Ware's Folly; and Montrose, built in 1849 and one of the Loveliest Greek Revival houses in the area. Houses photographed along the Plantation Trail, from Athens to Macon, include the white-columned President's House, home since 1949 to the presidents of the University of Georgia; the Howell Cobb House, in Athens; Whitehall, in Covington; Glan Mary, in Sparta; and the Woodruff House, in Macon. Gleason devotes considerable attention to the homes of the western side of the state, from Chickamauga to Thomasville. The Gordon-Lee House, constructed in 1847, was headquarters fro the Union army during the battle of chickamauga. Other houses in this part of Georgia are valley View, which overlooks the Etowah River, west of Cartersville; the Archibald Howell House, near downtown Marietta; Lovejoy, in Clayton Country; The oaks, in the vicinity of LaGrange; and Greenwood and Pebble Hill, near Thomasville. In all, Gleason captures more than one hundred of Georgia's most beautiful antebellum homes, including many lesser-known houses. In addition to exterior photographs, Antebellum Homes of Georgia contains a number of interior views as well as aerial photographs that show the relationship between the houses and their environs: outbuildings, formal gardens, and recd clay fields that were once white with cotton. Captions provide brief histories of the houses and their owners as weel as notes on construction and outstanding architectural details.

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The release of the song "Hound Dog" in 1953 marked a turning point in American popular culture, and throughout its history, the hit ballad bridged divides of race, gender, and generational conflict. Ben Wynne's A Hound Dog Tale discusses the stars who made this rock 'n' roll standard famous, from Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton to Elvis Presley, along with an eclectic cast of characters, including singers, songwriters, musicians, record producers and managers, famous television hosts, several lawyers, and even a gangster or two.Wynne's examination of this American classic reveals how "Hound Dog" reflected the values and issues of 1950s American society, and sheds light on the lesser-known elements of the song's creation and legacy. A Hound Dog Tale will capture the imagination of anyone who has ever tapped a foot to the growl of a blues riff or the bark of a rock 'n' roll guitar.

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No political leader is more closely identified with Louisiana State University than the flamboyant governor and U.S. senator Huey P. Long, who devoted his last years to turning a small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From 1931, when Long declared himself the "official thief" for LSU, to his death in 1935, the school's budget mushroomed, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty flourished, and its enrollment tripled. Along with improving LSU's academic reputation, Long believed the school's football program and band were crucial to its success. Taking an intense interest in the team, Long delivered pregame and halftime pep talks, devised plays, stalked the sidelines during games, and fired two coaches. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two directors, and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, "Touchdown for LSU." While he rarely meddled in academic affairs, Long insisted that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from "his school" opposed him, retribution was swift. Long's support for LSU did not come without consequences. His unrelenting involvement almost cost the university its accreditation. And after his death, several of his allies—including his handpicked university president—went to prison in a scandal that almost destroyed LSU.Rollicking and revealing, Robert Mann's Kingfish U is the definitive story of Long's embrace of LSU.

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Mardi Gras Indians explores how sacred and secular expressions of Carnival throughout the African diaspora came together in a gumbo-sized melting pot to birth one of the most unique traditions celebrating African culture, Indigenous peoples, and Black Americans. Williams ties together the fragments of the ancient traditions with the expressed experiences of the contemporary. From the sangamentos of the Kongolese and the calumets of the various tribes of the lower Mississippi River valley to one-on-one interviews with today's Black masking tribe members, this book highlights the spirit of resistance and rebellion upon which this culture was built.

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In Lincoln's Mercenaries, renowned Civil War historian William Marvel considers whether poor northern men bore the highest burden of military service during the American Civil War. Examining data on median family wealth from the 1860 United States Census, Marvel reveals the economic conditions of the earliest volunteers from each northern state during the seven major recruitment and conscription periods of the war. The results consistently support the conclusion that the majority of these soldiers came from the poorer half of their respective states' population, especially during the first year of fighting.Marvel further suggests that the largely forgotten economic depression of 1860 and 1861 contributed in part to the disproportionate participation in the war of men from chronically impoverished occupations. During this fiscal downturn, thousands lost their jobs, leaving them susceptible to the modest emoluments of military pay and community support for soldiers' families. From newspaper accounts and individual contemporary testimony, he concludes that these early recruits, whom historians have generally regarded as the most patriotic of Lincoln's soldiers, were motivated just as much by money as those who enlisted later for exorbitant bounties, and that those generous bounties were made necessary partly because war production and labor shortages improved economic conditions on the home front.A fascinating, comprehensive study, Lincoln's Mercenaries illustrates how an array of social and economic factors drove poor northern men to rely on military wages to support themselves and their families during the war.

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In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time.In the first section of this book, The Wheel, Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, Bird Ephemera, she explores historical figures- from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet's father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.

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Mardi Gras festivities don't end after the parades roll through the streets; rather, a large part of the celebration continues unseen by the general public. Retreating to theaters, convention centers, and banquet halls, krewes spend the post-parade evening at lavish balls, where members cultivate a sense of fraternity and reinforce the organization's shared values through pageantry and dance. In New Orleans Carnival Balls, Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of these exclusive soirees, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders.The oldest Carnival organizations- the Mistick Krewe of Comus, Twelfth Night Revelers, Krewe of Proteus, Knights of Momus, and Rex- emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. These old-line krewes ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I, and the traditions of their private balls reflected a need for group solidarity amidst a world in flux. For these organizations, Carnival balls became magical realms where krewesmen reinforced their elite identity through sculpted tableaux vivants performances, mock coronations, and romantic ballroom dancing. This world was full of possibilities: krewesmen became gods, kings, and knights, while their daughters became queens and maids. As the old-line krewes cultivated a sense of brotherhood, they used costume and movement to reaffirm their group identity, and the crux of these performances relied on a specific mode of expression- dancing.Using the concept of dance as a lens for examining Carnival balls, Atkins delves deeper into the historical context and distinctive rituals of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Beyond presenting readers with a new means of thinking about Carnival traditions, Atkins's work situates dance as a vital piece of historical inquiry and a mode of study that sheds new light on the hidden practices of some of the best-known krewes in the Big Easy.

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A two-hundred-year-old institution, the Poydras Home -- originally the Poydras Asylum -- stands as an exemplar of woman-led charitable organizations. In a thorough and engaging narrative, Pamela Tyler offers the first complete history of this remarkable New Orleans establishment from its founding as an orphanage for young girls to its present-day operation as a retirement community and assisted-living facility. Throughout, Tyler paints a vivid picture of the many women who faced down the challenges of war, disease, natural disaster, social unrest, and restrictive gender ideals to realize the mission of the Poydras Home.Drawing on previously unreleased archival material, Tyler documents how the institution's benefactor, Julien Poydras, used his immense wealth to support a haven for impoverished girls, and how the dedicated women of the Poydras board pursued that ambition through more than just residential services. Tyler reveals that the majority of the Poydras ""orphans"" had one living parent, and it was dire poverty and a dearth of social services in New Orleans that drove single parents, usually mothers, to place their daughters in the asylum. Further research demonstrates that the Poydras went beyond simply providing a shelter for the children of distressed parents; volunteer managers worked to shape their charges' character through an emphasis on morals, education, and the fundamentals of housewifery. Following the institution from its antebellum origins to Reconstruction, through the Progressive era, and into the obsolescence of children's homes in the mid-twentieth century, Tyler highlights the impacts of both national affairs and daily life on the charity. This rich history winds through the last fifty years as the Poydras Home boldly and successfully changed its mission to provide care for elderly men and women. The result of years of research, New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home is a sweeping social history that recognizes the determination of women caregivers and the thousands of lives they benefited.

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In 1964, as the polarizing Civil Rights Act made its way through the House and Senate, and Congress navigated one of the most tumultuous eras in American history, a Harris Poll put the institution's approval rating at 60 percent. Why then, fifty years later, has the public's approval of Congress eroded to an all-time low of 10 percent? Working Congress: A Guide for Senators, Representatives, and Citizens seeks to isolate the reasons for Congress's staggering decline in public opinion, and to propose remedies to reverse the grave dysfunction in America's most important political institution.Aided by the input of retired members of Congress from both major parties, editor Robert Mann and his fellow contributors identify paralyzing partisan rancor as perhaps the most significant reason for the American public's declining support of its main representative body. The lack of mutual trust within Congress reflects (and creates) the suspicion and animosity of the great majority of Americans. Working Congress argues that members of Congress must find a path to cooperation if they are to function as the representative institution the Founders intended.Trenchant chapters by Mickey Edwards, Ross K. Baker, Frances E. Lee, Brian L. Fife, Susan Herbst, and Mark Kennedy analyse the problems and challenges facing Congress and suggest solutions to counteract partisan gridlock. Though these scholars and former members share a conviction that men and women of good will can and should work together, they do not assume that their solutions will herald a bipartisan utopia. Instead, they recognise that Congress is, and will always be, a work in progress.

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In this debut work, Scott Eastman tackles the complex issue of nationalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic empire. Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic challenges the idea that nationalism arose from the ashes of confessional society. Rather, the tenets of Roman Catholicism and the ideals of Enlightenment worked together to lay the basis for a ""mixed modernity"" within the territories of the Spanish monarchy. Drawing on sermons, catechisms, political pamphlets, and newspapers, Eastman demonstrates how religion and tradition cohered within burgeoning nationalist discourses in both Spain and Mexico. And though the inclusive notion of Spanish nationalism faded as the revolutions in the Hispanic Atlantic world established new loyalty to postcolonial states, the religious imagery and rhetoric that had served to define Spanish identity survived and resurfaced throughout the course of the long nineteenth century. Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic skillfully debates the prevailing view that the monolithic Catholic Church -- as the symbol of the ancien régime -- subverted a secular progression toward nationalism and modernity. Eastman deftly contends that the common political and religious culture of the Spanish Atlantic empire ultimately transformed its subjects into citizens of the Hispanic Atlantic world.

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Landscape architect Lake Douglas employs written accounts, archival data, historic photographs, lithographs, maps, and city planning documents -- many of which have never before been published -- to explore public and private outdoor spaces in New Orleans and those who shaped them. The result offers the first in-depth examination of the city's landscape history.Douglas presents this ""beautiful and imposing"" city as a work of art crafted by numerous influences. His survey from the colonial period to the twentieth century finds that geography, climate, and, above all, the multicultural character of its residents have made New Orleans unique in American landscape design history. French and Spanish settlers, Africans and Native Americans, as well as immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and other parts of the world all participated in creating this community's unique public and private landscapes. Places such as Congo Square, Audubon Park, the river levees, and ""neutral grounds"" -- local residents' own term for medians -- together with ordinary residential gardens are all testaments to the city's international imprint. Douglas identifies five types of public and private designed landscapes in New Orleans: squares, linear open spaces, urban parks, commercial pleasure gardens, and domestic gardens. Discussing their design, function, and content, he shows how specific examples of each contribute to the city's unique character and also fit within the larger context of American landscape design history. Each type has its own complexion and reflects the influence of those who occupied it. Though New Orleanians lived in strata according to language, cultural identity, economics, and race, they found common ground, literally, in their community's landscapes.Douglas's sweeping study, illustrated with over 90 color and black-and-white images, includes an exploration of archival horticultural books, almanacs, and periodicals; information about laborers who actually built landscapes; details of horticultural commerce, services, and marketing materials; and an exhaustive inventory of plants grown in New Orleans for agricultural, medicinal, and ornamental uses.Public Spaces, Private Gardens provides an informative look at two hundred years of the designed landscapes and horticulture of New Orleans and a fresh perspective on one of America's most interesting and historic cities.

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Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the "Black world" paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression.Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery's afterlife—including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song—shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães's novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage," Kara Walker's sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon's expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.

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In John Kennedy Toole's iconic novel, Ignatius J. Reilly is never short of opinions about food or far away from his next bite. For the novel's millions of fans, Cynthia LeJeune Nobles's A Confederacy of Dunces Cookbook offers recipes inspired by the delightfully commonplace and always delicious fare of Ignatius and his cohorts.

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Leaving the crowded, tourist-driven French Quarter by crossing Esplanade Avenue, visitors and residents entering the Faubourg Marigny travel through rows of vibrantly colored Greek revival and Creole-style homes. For decades, this stunning architectural display marked an entry into a more authentic New Orleans. In the first complete history of this celebrated neighborhood, Scott S. Ellis chronicles the incomparable vitality of life in the Marigny, describes its architectural and social evolution across two centuries, and shows how many of New Orleans's most dramatic events unfolded in this eclectic suburb.Founded in 1805, the Faubourg Marigny benefited from waves of refugees and immigrants settling on its borders. Émigrés from Saint-Domingue, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in addition to a large community of the city's antebellum free people of color, would come to call Marigny home and contribute to its rich legacy. Shaped as well by epidemics and political upheaval, the young enclave hosted a post- Civil War influx of newly freed slaves seeking affordable housing and suffered grievous losses after deadly outbreaks of yellow fever. In the twentieth century, the district grew into a working-class neighborhood of creolized residents that eventually gave way to a burgeoning gay community, which, in turn, led to an era of ""supergentrification"" following Hurricane Katrina. Now, as with many historic communities in the heart of a growing metropolis, tensions between tradition and revitalization, informality and regulation, diversity and limited access contour the Marigny into an ever more kaleidoscopic picture of both past and present.Equally informative and entertaining, this nuanced history reinforces the cultural value of the Marigny and the importance of preserving this alluring neighborhood.

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Tracing the intersecting lives of a Confederate plantation owner and a free black Union soldier, Barbara L. Bellows' Two Charlestonians at War offers a poignant allegory of the fraught, interdependent relationship between wartime enemies in the Civil War South. Through the eyes of these very different soldiers, Bellows brings a remarkable, new perspective to the oft-told saga of the Civil War. Recounted in alternating chapters, the lives of Charleston natives born a mile a part, Captain Thomas Pinckney and Sergeant Joseph Humphries Barquet, illuminate one another's motives for joining the war as well as the experiences that shaped their worldviews. Pinckney, a rice planter and scion of one of America's founding families, joined the Confederacy in hope of reclaiming an idealized agrarian past; and Barquet, a free man of color and brick mason, fought with the Union to claim his rights as an American citizen. Their circumstances set the two men on seemingly divergent paths that nonetheless crossed on the embattled coast of South Carolina. Born free in 1823, Barquet grew up among Charleston's tight-knit community of the ""colored elite."" During his twenties, he joined the northward exodus of free blacks leaving the city and began his nomadic career as a tireless campaigner for black rights and abolition. In 1863, at age forty, he enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry- the renowned ""Glory"" regiment of northern black men. His varied challenges and struggles, including his later frustrated attempts to play a role in postwar Republican politics in Illinois, provide a panoramic view of the free black experience in nineteenth-century America.In contrast to the questing Barquet, Thomas Pinckney remained deeply connected to the rice fields and maritime forests of South Carolina. He greeted the arrival of war by establishing a home guard to protect his family's Santee River plantations that would later integrate into the 4th South Carolina Cavalry. After the war, Pinckney distanced himself from the racist violence of Reconstruction politics and focused on the daunting task of restoring his ruined plantations with newly freed laborers. The two Charlestonians' chance encounter on Morris Island, where in 1864 Sergeant Barquet stood guard over the captured Captain Pinckney, inspired Bellows' compelling narrative. Her extensive research adds rich detail to our knowledge of the dynamics between whites and free blacks during this tumultuous era. Two Charlestonians at War gives readers an intimate depiction of the ideological distance that might separate American citizens even as their shared history unites them.

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In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Bonner suggests that the Confederate nation was an expedient corporatist state -- a society that required all sectors of the economy to work for the national interest, as defined by a partnership of industrial leaders and a dominant government. As Bonner shows, the characteristics of the Confederate States' political economy included modern organisational methods that mirrored the economic landscape of other late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century corporatist governments. Southern leaders, Bonner argues, were slave-owning agricultural capitalists who sought a counterrevolution against northern liberal capitalism. During secession and as the war progressed, they built and reinforced Confederate nationalism through specific centralized government policies. Bolstered by the Confederate constitution, these policies evolved into a political culture that allowed for immense executive powers, facilitated an anti-party ideology, and subordinated individual rights. In addition, the South's lack of industrial capacity forced the Confederacy to pursue a curious manufacturing policy that used both private companies and national ownership to produce munitions. This symbiotic relationship was just one component of the Confederacy's expedient corporatist state: other wartime policies like conscription, the domestic passport system, and management of southern railroads also exhibited unmistakable corporatist characteristics. Bonner's probing research and new comparative analysis expand our understanding of the complex organisation and relationships in Confederate political and economic culture during the Civil War.

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The separation of white and black schools remained largely unquestioned and unchallenged in North Carolina for the first half of the twentieth century, yet by the end of the 1970s, the Tar Heel State operated the most thoroughly desegregated school system in the nation. In Race and Education in North Carolina, John E. Batchelor, a former North Carolina school superintendent, offers a robust analysis of this sea change and the initiatives that comprised the gradual, and often reluctant, desegregation of the state's public schools.In a state known for relative racial moderation, North Carolina government officials generally steered clear of fiery rhetorical rejections of Brown v. Board of Education, in contrast to the position of leaders in most other parts of the South. Instead, they played for time, staving off influential legislators who wanted to close public schools and provide vouchers to support segregated private schools, instituting policies that would admit a few black students into white schools, and continuing to sanction segregation throughout most of the public education system. Litigation - primarily initiated by the NAACP - and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created stronger mandates for progress and forced government officials to accelerate the pace of desegregation. Batchelor sheds light on the way local school districts pursued this goal while community leaders, school board members, administrators, and teachers struggled to balance new policy demands with deeply entrenched racial prejudice and widespread support for continued segregation.Drawing from case law, newspapers, interviews with policy makers, civil rights leaders, and attorneys involved in school desegregation, as well as previously unused archival material, Race and Education in North Carolina presents a richly textured history of the legal and political factors that informed, obstructed, and finally cleared the way for desegregation in the North Carolina public education system.

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After more than three decades, the peerless wit and indulgent absurdity of A Confederacy of Dunces continues to attract new readers. Though the manuscript was rejected by many publishers during Toole's lifetime, his mother successfully published the book years after her son's suicide, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This literary underdog and comic masterpiece has sold more than two million copies in twenty-three languages.The 35th anniversary edition of A Confederacy of Dunces celebrates Toole's novel as well as one of the most memorable protagonists in American literature, Ignatius J. Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubbed ""slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one."" Set in New Orleans with a wild cast of characters including Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; and Jones, the jivecat in space-age dark glasses, the novel serves as an outlandish but believable tribute to a city defined by its parade of eccentric denizens.The genius of A Confederacy of Dunces is reaffirmed as successive generations embrace this extravagant satire. Adulation for Toole's comic epic remains as intense today as thirty-five years ago.

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This book is Volume VIII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The South During Reconstruction is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series.The tragic Reconstruction period still casts its long shadow over the South. In his study, Mr. Coulter looks beyond the familiar political and economic patterns into the more fundamental attitudes and activities of the people. In this dismal period of racial and political bitterness, little notice has been taken of the strivings for reorganisation of agriculture under free labor, for industrial and transportation development, for a free-school system and higher education, and for the advance of religious, literary, and other cultural interests. Mr. Coulter's book shows these things to be very real, and they are related to the Radical program, which, conceived both in good and evil, ran its course and finally collapsed.This period forms an important chapter in American history. It is an account of a region, defeated in one of the world's great wars, struggling to rebuild its social and economic structure and to win back for itself a place in the reunited nation.

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Angela Voras ­-Hills's Louder Birds, her debut collection of poetry, is a beautiful study of the natural world, motherhood, and the inherent desire for meaning. This collection of complex lyric poems holds a haunting absence at its center, an absence that is ""impossible to navigate."" Yet Voras- ­Hills presses on, untangling the distinctions that surround her (human and animal, domestic and wild) with both bravery and respect. She writes, ""The boundaries between home and the road / are insecure: it's impossible to navigate this landscape. / We've all been in the presence of something dark / and have chosen not to seek shelter."" As the poet hones in on naming the void, her surroundings grow more threatening- but not once does she surrender or turn back. Voras- ­Hills's poems are smart enough to know the distinctions themselves are tenuous at best, and wise enough to know that we must always pay our dues to the world beyond our door. Wondrous, ruminative, and revelatory, Louder Birds is a collection that is not to be missed.

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In The Cemeteries of New Orleans, Peter B. Dedek reveals the origins and evolution of the Crescent City's world-famous necropolises, exploring both their distinctive architecture and their cultural impact. Spanning centuries, this fascinating body of research takes readers from muddy fields of crude burial markers to extravagantly designed cities of the dead, illuminating a vital and vulnerable piece of New Orleans's identity.Where many histories of New Orleans cemeteries have revolved around the famous people buried within them, Dedek focuses on the marble cutters, burial society members, journalists, and tourists who shaped these graveyards into internationally recognizable emblems of the city. In addition to these cultural actors, Dedek's exploration of cemetery architecture reveals the impact of ancient and medieval grave traditions and styles, the city's geography, and the arrival of trained European tomb designers, such as the French architect J. N. B. de Pouilly in 1833 and Italian artist and architect Pietro Gualdi in 1851.As Dedek shows, the nineteenth century was a particularly critical era in the city's cemetery design. Notably, the cemeteries embodied traditional French and Spanish precedents, until the first garden cemetery- the Metairie Cemetery- was built on the site of an old racetrack in 1872. Like the older walled cemeteries, this iconic venue served as a lavish expression of fraternal and ethnic unity, a backdrop to exuberant social celebrations, and a destination for sightseeing excursions. During this time, cultural and religious practices, such as the celebration of All Saints' Day and the practice of Voodoo rituals, flourished within the spatial bounds of these resting places. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, episodes of neglect and destruction gave rise to groups that aimed to preserve the historic cemeteries of New Orleans- an endeavor, which, according to Dedek, is still wanting for resources and political will.Containing ample primary source material, abundant illustrations, appendices on both tomb styles and the history of each of the city's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemeteries, The Cemeteries of New Orleans offers a comprehensive and intriguing resource on these fascinating historic sites.

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This is his home, and she always asks, despite the bowl decorated with her name in the breakfast cupboard, her shoes in the hallway. She doesn't dare say 'our home, my home.' Sandrine knows she is unlovable. So when Monsieur Langlois makes space for her in his heart and in his home, she feels certain she has found someone to hold on to. When his first wife shows up one day with accusations of abuse, she ignores them. Just as she ignores the way he's starting to look at her, and the way she always feels like she is walking on eggshells. But the atmosphere is starting to suffocate her - and soon Sandrine realises that she desperately needs to find a way out. ---- READERS LOVE THE SECOND WOMAN 'Creepy, paranoid, dark, compelling and very moving' ***** 'The Second Woman is absolutely phenomenal. A chilling, intense thriller, which circles around domestic abuse and controlling relationships' ***** 'This novel had me gripped from the very first page and I couldn't put it down, losing sleep to try and finish it... It was unpredictable and the suspense had me on the edge of my seat' ***** 'It was definitely a five-star knock-out...' *****

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In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; Kismet can''t even imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say ''no'' and so the die is cast. Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasionally her lover - and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back. Meanwhile Kismet''s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary''s family, and on her nightly truck drives along the highway from the farm to the factories, she tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future - both her daughter''s and her own. Starkly beautiful like the landscape it inhabits, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, f

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An exquisitely illustrated picture book that explores our relationship with the skies, and looks at how climate change is changing the picture.The skies make life on Earth possible! They give us weather, the air that we breathe, reveal the stars above us and offer a home to birds, butterflies and many other animals. But the skies and our air are under threat from climate change and pollution. Find out how we can all help to look after our precious skies, as well as enjoy them.Children''s Planet is a beautifully illustrated series of picture books that encourage children to engage with and enjoy our precious natural surroundings. Perfect for children aged 5 and up.

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All About Dyslexia is an accessible and informative guide for primary school teachers, designed to increase their understanding of dyslexia and enhance their toolkit with practical, adaptable strategies to support learners with dyslexia and specific learning difficulties in their setting.The book debunks myths and misconceptions and clearly defines dyslexia, shining a light on a different way of thinking and learning. It then looks at metacognition and dyslexia across the curriculum, with a focus on grounding literacy skills and supporting the foundations of reading. Drawing on the experience of the learners themselves, the book equips teachers with strategies for high-quality teaching that will benefit all learners, not just those with dyslexia. All About Dyslexia includes: Chapters that are easy to dip in and out of, with top tips and signposting to further resources and research. A wealth of up-to-date, evidence-based,

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Encuadernación: Rústica con solapasColección: Nuevos TiemposUna poderosa novela que merece la pena leer. Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesLa casa redonda presenta un lenguaje asombroso que recuerda la coloratura de Faulkner, García Márquez y Toni Morrison. Profundamente emotiva e imposible de olvidar. USA TodayUn domingo de primavera de 1988, una mujer india ojibwe es agredida en la reserva donde vive en Dakota del Norte. Los detalles de la brutal violación tardan en conocerse ya que Geraldine Coutts ha quedado traumatizada y se niega a revivir o contar lo ocurrido, tanto a la policía como a Bazil, su marido, y a Joe, su hijo de trece años. En solo un día, la vida del muchacho da un vuelco de forma irreversible. Intentará ayudar a su madre, pero esta se atrinchera en la cama hasta naufragar paulatinamente en un abismo de soledad. Cada vez más solo, Joe se verá arrojado de forma prematura al mundo de los adultos para el que aún no está preparado.Mientras su padre, ju

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There is incredibly important yet untapped talent among mothers who have replaced career aspirations or creative outlets with family priority. Those women who have put their interests on hold to care for their children face a huge challenge in re-connecting with the professional world again in a way that recognizes their needs to continue to be available for their children.This book will provide inspiration, encouragement, and a step-by-step approach for every mother wishing to engage their talents during the hours their children are at school. This book has strategies and tips for all aspects of life—from finding the right type of work to supporting your health—to help moms find purpose and balance through the crucial preschool years and beyond.

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