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Walt Whitman's short stint in New Orleans during the spring of 1848 was a crucial moment of literary and personal development. Walt Whitman's New Orleans is the first book dedicated to republishing his writings about the Crescent City, including numerous previously unknown pieces.

For seven months in 1880, Lafcadio Hearn amused the readers of New Orleans with his wood-block 'cartoons' and accompanying articles, which were variously funny, scathing, surreal, political, whimsical, and moral. This book collects, for the first time, all of the extant satirical columns and woodcut illustrations published in the Daily City Item.

During six months in 1862, William Jefferson Whatley and his wife, Nancy Falkaday Watkins Whatley, exchanged a series of letters that vividly demonstrate the quickly changing roles of women whose husbands left home to fight in the Civil War.

Lucy Wood Butler's diary provides a compelling account of one woman's struggle to come to terms with the realities of war on the Confederate home front. It brings to light a vital archival resource that reveals Lucy Butler's intimate observations on the attitudes and living conditions of many white middle-class women in the Civil War South.

A story of love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, African American writer Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk immerses readers in the opulent and brutal - yet also very fragile - society of France's richest colony, Saint Domingue.

Henry Clay Lewis was one of the leading southern humourists of the nineteenth century. Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor is a series of sketches that follow the outlandish misadventures of Dr Madison Tensas, Lewis' literary persona. Many of these stories were first published in New York's Spirit of the Times.

First published seventeen years after the end of the Civil War, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861-1865, by Francis W. Dawson, is the only memoir by a British citizen who saw active service in both the Confederate navy and army.

Augusta Jane Evans was one of the most popular domestic novelists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was the author of eight novels, of which Beulah was the second. For this new edition, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's introduction traces the history of the novel and places it in the context of the climate of the 1850s.

This story of the abduction of a free Negro adult from the North and his enslavement in the South--provides a sensational element which cannot be matched in any of the dozens of narratives written by former slaves. 'Think of it: For thirty years a man, wit all man's hopes, fears and aspirations--with a wife and children to call him by the endearing names of husband and father--with a home, humble it may be, but still a home...then for twelve years a thing, a chattel personal, classed with mules and horses....Oh! it is horrible. It chills the blood to think that such are.'

Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885-1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood.

In Surveying the Early Republic, Robert D. Bush contextualises the firsthand account of Andrew Ellicott, the United States Boundary Commissioner appointed by President George Washington in 1796.

David L. Cohn was in essence a "cosmopolitan provincial", an observer who realized that the problems and circumstances of the Delta were at the same time unique and universal. A native of Greenville, he was educated at the University of Virginia and Yale University Law School. A brief but highly successful career in business allowed him to pursue his dream of being a writer. He traveled widely but remained faithful to his Delta roots, counting among his close friends both William Alexander Percy and Hodding Carter. He was intensely interested in politics and served as speechwriter for Democratic party leaders, including Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and Lyndon Johnson. Lamenting the trend toward overspecialization, Cohn did not shrink from expressing his views on a wide array of topics: race and religion, free trade and internationalism, technology and culture, and materialism and matrimony, among others. Southern to the marrow and an almost zealously patriotic American, he was also a Jew and he managed a harmonious integration of all three identities rather than the separation or suppression of any one.

This journal records the Civil War experiences of a sensitive, well-educated, young southern woman. Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her mother, brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in Louisiana. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

First published in 1930, the essays in this manifesto constitute one of the outstanding cultural documents in the history of the South. In it, twelve southerners defended individualism against the trend of baseless conformity in an increasingly mechanised and dehumanised society.

Explains how the radical religiosity of both Flannery O'Connor's and Walker Percy's vision made them so valuable as southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, these two authors bequeathed a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha.

The wife of South Carolina secessionist governor Francis W. Pickens, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, was one of the most famous women in the South. Rumour had it that she published a novel, "The Free Flag of Cuba" under a pseudonym. This text resurrects Holcombe's lost work.

Albion Tourgee published a succession of novels and stories which made him famous. Bricks Without Straw, one of his two best-selling novels, is not only a moving story but an important commentary on the Reconstruction process in the South. In his introduction, Profession Otto H. Olsen gives a comprehensive evaluation of the book and its author.

Two months before the Civil War broke out, Emma Holmes made the first entry in a diary that would eventually hold vivid firsthand accounts of several major historical events. In presenting her picture of the wartime South, Holmes discussed numerous military figures, the role of women in the war effort, and the religious and social life of the day.

First published in 1864, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice was the third novel of Augusta Jane Evans, one of the leading women writers of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Long out of print and largely unavailable until now, Macaria is a compelling narrative about women and war.

The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, originally published in 1853, consists of twenty-six sketches and satires drawn from Joseph G. Baldwin's experiences as an attorney on the turbulent Mississippi and Alabama frontiers in the 1830s and 1840s. Like experiences, attempted to depict a lawless and colorful era in American history. Originally from Virginia, the author paints vivid and authentic portraits of shifty lawyers, unlettered judges, and inept prosecutors, as well as serious profiles of respected colleagues such as Seargent S. Prentiss. Even the narrator, we learn, is granted a license to practice law by a circuit judge who asks him "not a single legal question." One of the collection's most memorable characters is Ovid Bolus, whom Baldwin describes as a "natural liar, just as some horses are natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters." His adventures reflect Baldwin's fascination with the meaning of the law and the legal profession under the conditions that existed on the American frontier. James H. Justus' introduction places this new edition of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi in its historical literary context. According to Justus, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, published in 1835, is the volume credited as the first to exploit the southern backwoods In the vernacular realism we now call the humor of the Old Southwest. Justus also notes that in the preface to his book, Baldwin indirectly acknowledges his familiarity with earlier writers, and one sketch, "Simon Suggs, JR.," specifically pays homage to Johnson Jones Hooper. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi possesses enormous value for both literary scholars and historians. It remains a classic, not simply because it is sprightly social history, but because it is also an engrossing memoir by a man of uncommon subtlety of mind who projected his own sensibility into the record.

Originally published in 1832 and revised in 1851, Swallow Barn, John Pendleton Kennedy's novel of antebellum life on a tidewater Virginia plantation, was described by its author as "variously and interchangeably partaking of the complexion of a book of travels, a diary, a collection of letters, a drama, and a history."