Search results for ""louisiana""

A Scrap in the Blessings Jar, a volume of new and selected poems by David Bottoms, captures the evolution of the poet's spiritual quest over the past fifty years. A native and longtime resident of Georgia, Bottoms draws inspiration from the American South, and his work examines themes related to family dynamics, the woods, animals, fishing, and music in an effort to, as he once told an interviewer, "reveal something about the hidden things of the world, the vague or shadowy relationships and connections that exist just below the surface of our daily lives." This book charts his progression from tightly wrought naturalistic narratives to works that reflect his shifting conception of the interplay between memory, the present, and the metaphysical. At heart, Bottoms remains a storyteller who employs figurative language to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane, and whose poetry explores the depths of our existential condition and common humanity.

Read more less

Confederate Privateer is a comprehensive account of the brief life and exploits of John Yates Beall, a Confederate soldier, naval officer, and guerrilla in the Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes region. A resident of Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), near Harpers Ferry, Beall was a member of the militia guarding the site of John Brown's execution in 1859. Beall later signed on as a private in the Confederate army and suffered a wound in defense of Harpers Ferry early in the war. He quickly became a fanatical Confederate, ignoring the issue of slavery by focusing on a belief that he was fighting to preserve liberty against a tyrannical Republican party that had usurped the republic and its constitution.Limited by poor health but still seeking an active role in the Confederate cause, Beall traveled to the Midwest and then to Canada, where he developed an elaborate plan for Confederate operations on the Great Lakes. In Richmond, Beall laid his plan before Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory. Instead of the Great Lakes operation, Mallory authorized a small privateering action on the Chesapeake Bay. Led by "Captain" Beall, the operation damaged or destroyed several ships under the protection of the U.S. Navy. For his part in organizing the raids, Beall became known as the "Terror of the Chesapeake."After Union forces captured Beall and his men, the War Department prepared to try them as pirates. But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton backed down, and Beall was later freed in a prisoner exchange. Organizing another privateering operation on the Great Lakes, Beall had some early successes on the water. He then hatched a plan to derail a passenger train transporting Confederate prisoners of war near Niagara, New York, but was captured before he could carry out the mission. The Union army charged Beall with conspiracy, found him guilty, and executed him.Harris's history of Beall offers a new view of paramilitary efforts by civilians to support the Confederacy. Though little remembered today, Beall was a legendary figure in the Civil War South, so much so that his execution was on John Wilkes Booth's list of reasons to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Based on exhaustive research in primary and secondary sources and placed in the context of more extensive Confederate guerrilla operations, Confederate Privateer is sure to be of interest to Civil War scholars and general readers interested in the conflict.

Read more less

In 1951, a young Black woman, working as an overnight caretaker at a county-line beer joint in southwestern Mississippi, shot and killed a white intruder who was likely intending to assault her. Hattie Lee Barnes's killing of Lamar Craft threw the courts into a whirlwind of conflicting stories and murder attempts, illuminating the capriciousness of Mississippi justice, in which race, personal connections, and community expectations mattered a great deal.In Roadhouse Justice, Trent Brown examines the long-forgotten circumstances surrounding this case, revealing not only the details of Craft's death and the lengthy court proceedings that followed, but also the precarious nature of Black lives under the 1950s southern justice system. Told here in full for the first time, the story of Barnes's tribulations and ultimate victory demonstrates her intense determination and refusal to buckle under the enormous pressures she faced.

Read more less

Beads are one of the great New Orleans symbols, as much a signifier of the city as a pot of scarlet crawfish or a jazzman's trumpet. They are Louisiana's version of the Hawaiian lei, strung around tourists' and conventioneers' necks to demonstrate enthusiasm for the city. The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana's iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artefact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations.Beads are a big business based on valuelessness. Approximately 130 shipping containers, each filled with 40,000 pounds of Chinese-made beads and other baubles, arrive at New Orleans's biggest Mardi Gras throw importer each Carnival season. Beads are an unnatural part of the natural landscape, persistently dangling from the trees along parade routes like Spanish moss. They clutter the doorknobs of the city, sway behind its rearview mirrors, test the load-bearing strength of its attic rafters, and clog its all-important rainwater removal system.Mardi Gras Beads traces the history of these parade trinkets from their origins in Twelfth Night festivities through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Veteran Mardi Gras reporter Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change.

Read more less

What remained of the badly decomposed body of twelve ­-year ­-old Tina Marie Andrews was discovered underneath a discarded sofa in the woods outside of McComb, Mississippi, on August 23, 1969. Ten days earlier, Andrews and a friend had accepted a ride home after leaving the Tiger's Den, a local teenage hangout, but they were driven instead to the remote area where Andrews was eventually murdered. Although eyewitness testimony pointed to two local police officers, no one was ever convicted of this brutal crime, and to this day the case remains officially unsolved. Contemporary local newspaper coverage notwithstanding, the story of Andrews's murder has not been told. Indeed, many people in the McComb community still, more than fifty years later, hesitate to speak of the tragedy. Trent Brown's Murder in McComb is the first comprehensive examination of this case, the lengthy investigation into it, and the two extended trials that followed. Brown also explores the public shaming of the state's main witness, a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and the subsequent desecration of Andrews's grave. Set against the uneasy backdrop of the civil rights movement, Brown's study deftly reconstructs various accounts of the murder, explains why the juries reached the verdicts they did, and explores the broader forces that shaped the community in which Andrews lived and died. Unlike so many other accounts of violence in the Jim Crow South, racial animus was not the driving force behind Andrews's murder; in fact, most of the individuals central to the case, from the sheriff to the judges to the victim, were white. Yet Andrews, as well as her friend Billie Jo Lambert, the state's key witness, were ""girls of ill repute,"" as one defense attorney put it. To many people in McComb, Tina and Billie Jo were ""trashy"" children whose circumstances reflected their families' low socioeconomic standing. In the end, Brown suggests that Tina Andrews had the great misfortune to be murdered in a town where the locals were overly eager to support law, order, and stability- instead of true justice- amid the tense and uncertain times during and after the civil rights movement.

Read more less

Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett's doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer's fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and industrialization that saw Old World lifestyles and customs dissolve amid rapidly changing environments. Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation's past. In these twenty-six essays- divided by the editors into sections on topics like frontiers, slavery, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the West- notable historians engage with films and the historical events they ostensibly depict. Instead of just separating fact from fiction, the essays contemplate the extent to which movies generate and promulgate collective memories of American history. Along with new takes on familiar classics like Young Mr. Lincoln and They Died with Their Boots On, the volume covers several films released in recent years, including The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, Free State of Jones, and The Hateful Eight. The authors address Hollywood epics like The Alamo and Amistad, arguing that these movies flatten the historical record to promote nationalist visions. The contributors also examine overlooked films like Hester Street and Daughters of the Dust, considering their portraits of marginalized communities as transformative perspectives on American culture. By surveying films about nineteenth-century America, Writing History with Lightning analyzes how movies create popular understandings of American history and why those interpretations change over time.

Read more less

It's Father's Day 1972 and a young boy's dad takes him to visit a string of unimpressive ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother; the unconventional detective work of a koan-speaking, Kung Fu-loving uncle solves a case of arson during a pancake breakfast; and a former geology professor, recovering from addiction, finds himself sharing a taxicab with specters from a Jim Crow-era lynching. Set in and around the fictional town of Steepleburg, South Carolina, the loosely tied stories in George Singleton's Staff Picks place sympathetic, oddball characters in absurd, borderline surreal situations that slowly reveal the angst of southern history with humor and bite. In the tradition of Donald Barthelme, T. C. Boyle, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver, Singleton creates lingering, darkly comedic tales by drawing from those places where familiarity and alienation coexist. A remarkable and distinct effort from an acclaimed chronicler of the South, Staff Picks reaffirms Singleton's gift for crafting short story collections that both deliver individual gems and shine as a whole.

Read more less

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

Read more less

For three days in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, eight thousand American civil rights activists and Black Power leaders gathered at the National Black Political Convention, hoping to end a years-long feud that divided black America into two distinct camps: integrationists and separatists. While some form of this rift existed within black politics long before the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his death- and the power vacuum it created- heightened tensions between the two groups, and convention leaders sought to merge these competing ideologies into a national, unified call to action. What followed, however, effectively crippled the Black Power movement and fundamentally altered the political strategy of civil rights proponents. An intense and revealing history, Leonard N. Moore's The Defeat of Black Power provides the first in-depth evaluation of this critical moment in American history.During the brief but highly charged meeting in March 1972, attendees confronted central questions surrounding black people's involvement in the established political system: reject or accept integration and assimilation; determine the importance or futility of working within the broader white system; and assess the perceived benefits of running for public office. These issues illuminated key differences between integrationists and separatists, yet both sides understood the need to mobilize under a unified platform of black self-determination. At the end of the convention, determined to reach a consensus, officials produced ""The National Black Political Agenda,"" which addressed the black constituency's priorities. While attendees and delegates agreed with nearly every provision, integrationists maintained their rejection of certain planks, namely the call for a U.S. constitutional convention and separatists' demands for reparations. As a result, black activists and legislators withdrew their support less than ten weeks after the convention, dashing the promise of the 1972 assembly and undermining the prerogatives of black nationalists. In The Defeat of Black Power, Moore shows how the convention signaled a turning point for the Black Power movement, whose leaders did not hold elective office and were now effectively barred access to the levers of social and political power. Thereafter, their influence within black communities rapidly declined, leaving civil rights activists and elected officials holding the mantle of black political leadership in 1972 and beyond.

Read more less

In these essays, Gary Fincke combines a journalist's relentless investigations into the darkest corners of the human condition with an academic's love for arcana. In one essay, almost forgotten homeopathic recipes from the pantries of Pennsylvania Dutch country are interwoven with the panicked absurdities of elementary school health classes in the 1960s. In another, old case files of small town murders intertwine with meditations on all the fears, large and small, that accompany parenting. In The Darkness Call, Fincke plumbs the depths- child abuse, violence, illness, grief- not for their sadness but for moments of courage, hope, empathy, and light.

Read more less

In an era during which the United States Supreme Court handed down some of its most important decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Baker v. Carr (1962), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), three senators from South Carolina- Olin Johnston, Strom Thurmond, and Ernest ""Fritz"" Hollings- waged war on the court's progressive agenda by targeting the federal judicial nominations process. To Face Down Dixie explores these senators' role in some of the most contentious confirmation battles in recent history, including those of Thurgood Marshall, Abe Fortas, and Clement Haynsworth.In scrutinizing Supreme Court nominees and attempting to restrict the power of the nine justices of the court, these senators defied not only the leadership of the Democratic Party but also the Senate traditions of hierarchy and seniority. Along with South Carolina's conservative, segregationist political establishment, which maintained ironclad control over the state's legislature, Johnston, Thurmond, and Hollings effectively drowned out the many moderate voices in South Carolina that remained critical of their obstructionism, thus advancing their own conservative credentials and boosting their chances of reelection.To Face Down Dixie examines for the first time the central role that South Carolina played in turning Supreme Court nomination hearings into confrontational and political public events. James O. Heath argues that the state's war on the court concealed its antipathy to civil rights by using the confirmation process to challenge the court's function as the final arbiter of policy on questions relating to law and order, obscenity, communist subversion, and school prayer. Heath's study illustrates that while South Carolina's history of ""massive resistance"" is less prominent than that of other states, its politicians acted as persistent antagonists in the complex and dramatic debates in the U.S. Senate during the era of civil rights.

Read more less

Washington and Lee University, 1930- 2000 tells the history of one of the nation's oldest colleges as it evolved to face changes in higher education and in American society. In the early part of the twentieth century, Washington and Lee was a small, all-male institution known for its conservative inclinations, coats and ties, social life dominated by fraternities, and venerable honor system run exclusively by students. In the seven decades after 1930, the university confronted economic depression and world war, and faced the challenges and opportunities posed by subsidized athletics, integration, changing student customs and attitudes, new emphases in higher education, and the controversial move to coeducation. Each of the presidents who led the university during this era encouraged Washington and Lee to adapt to new demands while retaining its core traditions and identity. The alma mater of three United States Supreme Court justices, over a hundred members of congress and state governors, and winners of the Pulitzer, Nobel, Tony, and Emmy awards, Washington and Lee University receives a full and complex depiction in this authoritative history.

Read more less

In poems inspired by and sometimes borrowing their forms from the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer addressing and seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, Jacques Rancourt explores the complexities of faith, desire, beauty, and justice. Novena is a collection that invites prayer not to symbols of dogmatic perfection but to those who are outcast or maligned, LGBTQ people, people in prison, people who resist, people who suffer and whose suffering has not been redeemed. In Novena, the Virgin Mary is recast as a drag queen, religious icons are merged with those who are abolished, and spiritual isolation is scrutinised in a queer pastoral.

Read more less

In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women's contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts.Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton's telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women's roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women's overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women's roles in reshaping the war's legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men's roles, including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war.As Clinton's work demonstrates, the larger questions of women's wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war's impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War.

Read more less

In his latest collection, Random Exorcisms, Adrian C. Louis writes poems with the rough-edged wit and heart-wrenching sincerity that make him one of the seminal voices in contemporary American poetry. Deeply rooted in Native American traditions and folklore, these poems tackle a broad range of subjects, including Facebook, zombies, horror movies, petty grievances, real grief, and pure political outrage. In a style entirely his own, Louis writes hilarious, genuine, self-deprecating poems that expel a great many demons, including any sense of isolation a reader might feel facing a harsh and lonely world. In the poem ""Necessary Exorcism,"" the speaker exorcises himself, more or less, of his grief for his deceased wife. ""I made my choice so easily & picked red drama, the joyous pain of it all,"" he writes. ""Minor Exorcism: 1984"" is one of a series of poems that contemplates the memories of small, simple mundanes, like catching a fish, until, ""My old heart is thrashing with / long-forgotten boyhood joy."" ""Dog the Bounty Hunter Blogs"" confronts some of the cruel absurdities of reality TV, while ""Naked, Midnight, Sober, Facebooking"" expels a great many fearful things, including the fear of growing older. These are poems that make you laugh and cry, nod appreciatively, and then laugh just a little more.

Read more less

As the author and artist of a heroine's surreal journey through a haunting southern landscape, Kelli Scott Kelley reveals the mastery of her craft and the strong narrative ability of her artwork. Borrowing from Roman mythology, Jungian analysis, and the psychology of fairy tales, Kelley presents a story of family dysfunction, atonement, and transformation.Reproductions of her artwork -- mixed-media paintings executed on repurposed antique linens -- punctuate the tale of Accalia, who is tasked with recovering the arms of her father from the belly of the swamp monster. Visually and metaphorically, Accalia's odyssey enchants and displaces as Kelley delicately balances the disquieting with the familiar. Rich in symbolism and expertly composed, Accalia and the Swamp Monster pulls readers into the physical realm through Kelley's chimerical imagery and then pushes them towards the inner world of the subconscious. To that end, Kelley's story is accompanied by essays from Jungian analyst Constance Romero and art historian Sarah Bonner.A culmination of nearly a decade of work, introspection, and research, Accalia and the Swamp Monster is both an entrancing display of Kelley's art and an affirmation of the transformative power of fairy tales.

Read more less

Praise for David Kirby ""Kirby is exuberant, irrepressible, maniacal and remarkably entertaining.... Okay, let me just say it: he is a wonderful poet."" -- Steve Kowit, San Diego Union-Tribune""Kirby's voice and matter (teaching, literature, traveling, rock 'n' roll, everyday bozohood) are utterly personal and, despite all the laughter, ultimately moving."" -- Ray Olson, Booklist""[Kirby] is a poet who peels away the layers of our skin to show us who we are: our weaknesses, our strengths, and our hilarious obsessions."" -- Micah Zevin, New Pages""The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror."" -- Philip Levine, Ploughshares""These poems may be too cool for words."" -- Carol Muske-Dukes, New York Times Book ReviewInspired by the carpenter's biscuit joint -- a seamless, undetectable fit between pieces of wood -- David Kirby's latest collection dramatizes the artistic mind as a hidden connection that links the mundane with the remarkable. Even in our most ordinary actions, Kirby shows, there lies a wealth of creative inspiration: ""the poem that is written every day if we're there / to read it.""Well known for his garrulous and comic musings, Kirby follows a wandering yet calculated path. In ""What's the Plan, Artists?"" a girl's yawning in a picture gallery leads him to meditations on subjects as diverse as musical composition, the less-than-beautiful human figure, and ""the simple pleasures / of living."" The Biscuit Joint traverses seemingly random thoughts so methodically that the journey from beginning to end always proves satisfying and surprising.

Read more less

Skillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius K. Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history. In Revolutionary Emancipation, Fergus argues that the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky's War, the largest and most destructive rebellion of enslaved peoples in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution, provided the rationale for abolition and reform of the colonial system.Fergus shows that following Tacky's War, British colonies in the West Indies sought political preservation under state-regulated amelioration of slavery. He further contends that abolitionists' successes, from partial to general prohibition of the slave trade, hinged more on the economic benefits of creolizing slave labor and the costs of preserving the colonies from destructive emancipation rebellions than on a conviction of justice and humanity for Africans. In the end, Fergus maintains, slaves' commitment to revolutionary emancipation kept colonial focus on reforming the slave system. His study carefully dissects new evidence and reinterprets previously held beliefs, offering historians the most compelling arguments for African agency in abolitionism.

Read more less

The formation of the Confederate States of America involved more than an attempt to create a new, sovereign nation -- it inspired a flurry of creativity and entrepreneurialism in the South that fiercely matched Union ingenuity. H. Jackson Knight's Confederate Invention brings to light the forgotten history of the Confederacy's industrious inventors and its active patent office.Despite the destruction wrought by the Civil War, evidence of Confederate inventions exists in the registry of the Confederate States Patent Office. Hundreds of southerners submitted applications to the agency to secure patents on their intellectual property, which ranged from a ""machine for operating submarine batteries,"" to a ""steam plough,"" to a ""combined knapsack and tent,"" to an ""instrument for sighting cannon."" The Confederacy's most successful inventors included entrepreneurs, educators, and military men who sought to develop new weapons, weapon improvements, or other inventions that could benefit the Confederate cause as well as their own lives. Each creation belied the conception of a technologically backward South, incapable of matching the creativity and output of northern counterparts. Knight's work provides a groundbreaking study that includes neglected and largely forgotten patents as well as an array of other primary sources. Details on the patent office's origins, inner workings, and demise, and accounts of southern inventors who obtained patents before, during, and after the war reveal a captivating history recovered from obscurity.A novel creation in its own right, Confederate Invention presents the remarkable story behind the South's long-forgotten Civil War inventors and offers a comprehensive account of Confederate patents.

Read more less

In this companion to The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell Irvin Wiley explores the daily lives of the men in blue who fought to save the Union. With the help of many soldiers' letters and diaries, Wiley explains who these men were and why they fought, how they reacted to combat and the strain of prolonged conflict, and what they thought about the land and the people of Dixie. This fascinating social history reveals that while the Yanks and the Rebs fought for very different causes, the men on both sides were very much the same. ""This wonderfully interesting book is the finest memorial the Union soldier is ever likely to have.... [Wiley] has written about the Northern troops with an admirable objectivity, with sympathy and understanding and profound respect for their fighting abilities. He has also written about them with fabulous learning and considerable pace and humor.

Read more less

In early May 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant initiated a drive through central Virginia to crush Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. For forty days, the armies fought a grinding campaign from the Rapidan River to the James River that helped decide the course of the Civil War. Several of the war's bloodiest engagements occurred in this brief period: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River, Totopotomoy Creek, Bethesda Church, and Cold Harbor. Pitting Grant and Lee against one another for the first time in the war, the Overland Campaign, as this series of battles and maneuvers came to be called, represents military history at its most intense. In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee, a unique blend of narrative and photographic journalism from Gordon C. Rhea, the foremost authority on the Overland Campaign, and Chris E. Heisey, a leading photographer of Civil War battlefields, provides a stunning, stirring account of this deadly game of wits and will between the Civil War's foremost military commanders. Here Grant fought and maneuvered to flank Lee out of his heavily fortified earthworks. And here Lee demonstrated his genius as a defensive commander, countering Grant's every move. Adding to the melee were cavalry brawls among the likes of Philip H. Sheridan, George A. Custer, James Ewell Brown ""Jeb"" Stuart, and Wade Hampton. Forty days of combat produced horrific casualties, some 55,000 on the Union side and 35,000 on the Confederate. By the time Grant crossed the James and began the Siege of Petersburg, marking an end to this maneuver, both armies had sustained significant losses that dramatically reduced their numbers.Rhea provides a rich, fast-paced narrative, movingly illustrated by more than sixty powerful color images from Heisey, who captures the many moods of these hallowed battlegrounds as they appear today. Heisey made scores of visits to the areas where Grant and Lee clashed, giving special attention to lesser-known sites on byways and private property. He captures some of central Virginia's most stunning landscapes, reminding us that though battlefields conjure visions of violence, death, and sorrow, they can also be places of beauty and contemplation. Accompanying the modern pictures are more than twenty contemporary photographs taken during the campaign or shortly afterwards, some of them never before published. At once an engaging military history and a vivid pictorial journey, In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee offers a fresh vision of some of the country's most significant historic sites.

Read more less

Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself a poet and painter, soon recognised her genius and urged her to publish her poems. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Although she is regarded as the greatest woman poet of the Victorian period, there has not been until now and authoritative edition of her poetry.In this second volume of the three-volume The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, R.W. Crump continues the editorial standards she established n Volume I, published in 1979. She gives the reader a comprehensive text with notes revealing Christina's process of composition and revision and her painstaking concern for the technical details of her work. The variant readings in the notes are taken from extant manuscripts, individual poems as published or privately printed before being incorporated into her published collections, and all the English and American editions of her poems through William Michael Rossetti's The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904). A special feature of both Volumes I and II is a complete list of holographs and their locations.Volume II contains Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893), as well as the poems added to these volumes after their original publication. Volume III contains poems Christina published but did not include in any of her collections as well as poems that have not previously appeared in print.

Read more less

This book is the trade edition of Volume VI 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 Growth of Southern Nationalism is written by an outstanding student of Southern history.The growth of Southern nationalism was largely the product of relations of the South to other states and to the Federal government. Often what happened in the North and the reaction of Northern men to events determined Southern action and reaction. The sections were being drawn closer together and their interests more and more entwined. That was one of the great reasons for the increased friction and discord.The sectional quarrel developed largely around slavery as a thing in itself and then as a symbol of all differences and conflicts. The reduction of the struggle to the simple terms of Northern ""rights"" and Southern ""rights"" placed issues beyond the abilities of the democratic process and rendered the great masses in both sections helpless before the drift into war.The break could not have been avoided, according to Mr. Craven, unless either the North of the South had been willing to yield its position on an issue that involved matters of ""right"" or ""rights."" Neither could do so because slavery and come to symbolize values in each of their social-economic structures for which men fight and die but which they do not give up or compromise.

Read more less

Tracks down the many lives of this protean cocktail. The drink, named by French propagandists during World War I, was said to pack a punch as powerful as that nation's celebrated 75mm cannon. At the end of the century, the French 75 surfaced at Arnaud's Restaurant and became as entrenched in New Orleans as the famed second line.

Read more less

Critics often trace the prevailing mood of despair and purported nihilism in the works of Cormac McCarthy to the striking absence of interior thought in his seemingly amoral characters. In No More Heroes, however, Lydia Cooper reveals that though McCarthy limits inner revelations, he never eliminates them entirely. In certain crucial cases, he endows his characters with ethical decisions and attitudes, revealing a strain of heroism exists in his otherwise violent and apocalyptic world.Cooper evaluates all of McCarthy's work to date, carefully exploring the range of his narrative techniques. The writer's overwhelmingly distant, omniscient third-person narrative rarely shifts to a more limited voice. When it does deviate, however, revelations of his characters' consciousness unmistakably exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. The quiet, internal struggles of moral men such as John Grady Cole in The Border Trilogy and the father in The Road demonstrate an imperfect but very human heroism.Even when the writing moves into the minds of immoral characters, McCarthy draws attention to the characters' humanity, forcing the perceptive reader to identify with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Cooper shows that this rare yet powerful recognition of commonality and the internal yearnings for community and a commitment to justice or compassion undeniably exist in McCarthy's work.No More Heroes directly addresses the essential question about McCarthy's brutal and morally ambiguous universe and reveals poignant new answers.

Read more less

Captives and Voyagers traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire. Alexander X. Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams of black dislocation: the forced migration of Africans from the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the journeys of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty for people whose movements were similarly beset by extreme violence and catastrophe.

Read more less

Richard M. Weaver believed that ""rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves."" Language is Sermonic offers eight of Weaver's best essays on the nature of traditional rhetoric and its role in shaping society. Arguing throughout the book against society's reverence for relativism, and the consequential disregard for real values, this philosophical idealist uses his southern background and classical education as a backdrop for his scrutiny of our misuse of language.Weaver argues that rhetoric in its highest form involves making and persuasively presenting choice among goods. He condemns such supposedly value-free stances as cultural relativism, semantic positivism, scientism, and radical egalitarianism. Eschewing such peripheral aspect s of rhetoric as memorization and delivery, aspects too often now presented as the whole, Weaver deals instead with the substance of rhetoric. Ideas and the words used to express them, these are Weaver's subjects.Anyone concerned about language, its use and abuse in contemporary society, will find Language is Sermonic provocative and rewarding. The editors' critical interpretation of all of Weaver's writing, as well as Ralph Eubanks' brief appreciation of Weaver, make this a book no student of language and ideas should be without.Richard M. Weaver was one of the most stimulating and controversial rhetorical theorists of our time. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago and was the author of several books, including Visions of Order, Ideas Have Consequences, The Ethics of Rhetoric, and Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays.

Read more less

Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centenary in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out how this polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape, encompassing the debates of the nation's founders, the traditions of Western Romanticism, and the juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book includes six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, and Joan Didion. By encouraging a reconsideration of his career from its beginnings to his final books in the early twenty-first century, Norman Mailer at 100 forges a new path toward appreciating the author's achievements that underscores the extent to which his work can help us confront the challenges of today.

Read more less

Penelope Lemon is back for more madcap mom adventures in Inman Majors's hilariously unruly Operation Dimwit. It's summertime, and son Theo is away at camp. Feeling frisky, free, and tired of living vicariously through nighttime trysts with erotic novels, Penelope can begin phase two of her postdivorce life. First on the agenda is a date with the mysterious Fitzwilliam Darcy, who lives in a mansion with his snobbish cat, Algernon, and who spends his spare time painting massive nude portraits. Meanwhile, back at the trailer-park office, Penelope's boss, Missy, has become obsessed with getting rid of Dimwit, the backwoods interloper who may be stealing personal items from female residents. A sting operation to catch him in the act is planned, something so kooky and ill-advised that only a legendary goofball such as Missy could set it into motion. Throw in a bully trainer at Penelope's new gym, plus an infestation of skunks that requires the services of a wildlife expert and homespun mystic known as the Critter Catcher, and it becomes clear that Penelope's two weeks off from parenting won't be as relaxing and incident-free as she hoped. Building on the comedic hijinks of Penelope Lemon: Game On!, Operation Dimwit is a warmhearted look at the challenges of being a single working mom trying to stay afloat in the middle class after a divorce. Zany, stylish, and uproariously funny, this southern comedy will have readers laughing out loud at familiar absurdities of life in the twenty-first-century USA.

Read more less

The Creole praline arrived in New Orleans with the migration of formerly enslaved people fleeing Louisiana plantations after the Civil War. As it uncovers the history of a sweet dessert made of sugar and pecans, this book tells a fascinating story of Black entrepreneurship, toxic white nostalgia, and the rise of tourism in the Crescent City.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less