Bøger udgivet af LSU Press

Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan (1787-1867) was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with a remarkable array of social, economic, and political contacts in pre-Civil War America. In this, the first biography of Duncan, Martha Jane Brazy offers a compelling new portrait of antebellum life through exploration of Duncan's multifaceted personal networks in both the South and the North. Duncan grew up in an elite Pennsylvania family with strong business ties in Philadelphia. There was little indication, though, that he would become a cosmopolitan entrepreneur who would own over fifteen plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, collectively owning more than two thousand slaves. With style and substance, Martha Jane Brazy describes both the development of Duncan's businesses and the lives of the slaves on whose labor his empire was constructed. According to Brazy, Duncan was a hybrid, not fully a southerner or a northerner. He was also, Brazy shows, a paradox. Although he put down deep roots in Natchez, his sphere of influence was national in scope. Although his wealth was greatly dependent on the slaves he owned, he predicted a clash over the issue of slave ownership nearly three decades before the onset of the Civil War. Perhaps more than any other planter studied, Duncan contradicts historians' definition of the southern slaveholding aristocracy. By connecting and contrasting the networks of this elite planter and those he enslaved, Brazy provides new insights into the slaveocracy of antebellum America.

During the American Civil War, the western Trans-Mississippi frontier was host to harsh environmental conditions, irregular warfare, and intense racial tensions that created extraordinarily difficult conditions for both combatants and civilians. Matthew M. Stith's Extreme Civil War focuses on Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory to examine the physical and cultural frontiers that challenged Confederate and Union forces alike. A disturbing narrative emerges where conflict indiscriminately beset troops and families in a region that continually verged on social and political anarchy. With hundreds of small fights disbursed over the expansive borderland, fought by civilians-- even some women and children--as much as by soldiers and guerrillas, this theater of war was especially savage. Despite connections to the political issues and military campaigns that drove the larger war, the irregular conflict in this border region represented a truly disparate war within a war. The blend of violence, racial unrest, and frontier culture presented distinct challenges to combatants, far from the aid of governmental services. Stith shows how white Confederate and Union civilians faced forces of warfare and the bleak environmental realities east of the Great Plains while barely coexisting with a number of other ethnicities and races, including Native Americans and African Americans. In addition to the brutal fighting and lack of basic infrastructure, the inherent mistrust among these communities intensified the suffering of all citizens on America's frontier. Extreme Civil War reveals the complex racial, environmental, and military dimensions that fueled the brutal guerrilla warfare and made the Trans-Mississippi frontier one of the most difficult and diverse pockets of violence during the Civil War.

In 1685, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made Catholicism the only recognized religion in France and criminalized the practice of Calvinism, throwing the minority Protestant population into crisis. A Peddler's Tale personifies these events in the story of Jean Giraud, a Protestant merchant-peddler, and his various communities. Drawing on Giraud's account book; municipal, parish, and consistory records; and death inventories, Kristine Wirts ably reconstructs Giraud's familial, commercial, and religious circles. She provides a detailed description of the persecution of Giraud and his fellow church members in La Grave, France, as well as their flight across the Alps to Vevey, Switzerland. The town's residents did not welcome all refugees equally, often expelling Huguenots without social connections or financial resources. Those allowed to stay worked diligently to reestablish their lives and fortunes. Once settled in Vevey, Giraud and his extended family supported themselves by moneylending and peddling books, watch parts, and lace products. In contrast to past studies on the Huguenot diaspora that often depicted those fleeing France in heroic terms, A Peddler's Tale exposes the harsh economic realities many exiles faced, as well as the importance of social relationships and the necessity of having financial means to secure passage and sanctuary. Wirts contends that Huguenotrefugees who succeeded in obtaining permanent residency in Vevey shared one important element: many derived their livelihood from the burgeoning economic ties and social bonds that emerged with the rise of capitalist markets. A compelling microhistory, A Peddler's Tale ultimately illustrates the role and power of informal networks in sustaining and fostering early modern communities.

"Perhaps no other Louisiana dish is as well-known as gumbo. Yet, as ubiquitous as it is, gumbo remains one of the least-understood and most-debated foods from the Bayou State. While everyone claims to know what gumbo is, practically no one can agree on what goes in one. Chicken or seafood, okra or filâe, tomatoes or no tomatoes? Bear fat was once a staple in gumbo, corn meal was incorporated into the dish before rice was, and ham was once more common than smoked sausage. Disputes also extend to gumbo's origins. Is it Cajun or Creole? Does it hail from Africa, France, or North America? Over the decades, historians have pieced together clues to explain gumbo's likely origin story and yet they have never reached a consensus, allowing plenty of room for varied interpretations and explorations. In Gumbo, Jonathan Olivier draws on interviews with academics and chefs, original historical documents, and anecdotal personal information to consider the evolution of gumbo in the Pelican State. Oliver canvasses its origins in eighteenth-century Louisiana and moves on to the changes gumbo underwent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the commercial of agriculture and general commercialization. He concludes with contemporary takes on the dish. Overall, this book provides a comprehensive look at gumbo that will inform and entertain both Louisiana readers and visitors to the state"--

"Once beloved, then feared, and eventually just tolerated, kudzu can be found nearly everywhere across the South. For everything from trees to crops, in American popular culture, the invasive vine with Eastern Asian origins has long signified the end of times, known to smother everything in its path in an embrace of certain death. To many, the plant's enduring legacy has been its villainous role as the 'vine that ate the South.' But for a select few, it has begun to morph into something else entirely. In its roots, a network of people scattered across the country see a chance at redemption - and an opportunity to rewrite a fragment of troubled history. Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine that Ate the South detangles the complicated story of one region's fickle relationship with kudzu, taking readers on an atmospheric expedition through time, chronicling the ways one boundless weed has evolved over centuries, and dissecting what we know about what climate change could mean for its future across the United States. From architecture teams using it as a building material in pursuit of a low-carbon supply chain, to clinical applications treating binge-drinking, to delicacies served in restaurants, Ayurella Horn-Muller spotlights how kudzu's notoriously tangled reputation in America is gradually being cast aside in favor of its promise. Within these pages, readers will witness the remarkable ways public perception of kudzu has deviated - as the people living in ecosystems overrun by it have bounced between embracing its gifts and fighting to destroy it. Doggedly pursuing answers to determine what we conclusively know about kudzu - and what we don't - Horn-Muller unites careful research with human stories to explore how kudzu morphed from a glorified, miraculous solution for soil erosion to the monstrous archetypal foe of the Southern landscape. Devoured is a real-life narrative of belonging, of racial ambiguity, of outsiders and insiders, and the path from universal acceptance to undesirability. It is a deeply reported tale of mystery, a portal into the past, present, and future of a quintessential plant. It is a saga of intrigue, a dive into the farthest reaches and darkest depths of the very landscapes housing the species we fight to control. Above all, this is an ode to the Earth around us - a quest for memories and for meaning in today's imperiled world"--

Founded in 1841 in Marion, Alabama, Howard College provided a Christian liberal arts education for young men living along the old southwestern frontier. The founders named the school after eighteenth-century British reformer John Howard, whose words and deeds inspired the type of enlightened moral agent and virtuous Christian citizen the institution hoped to produce. In From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, S. Jonathan Bass provides a comprehensive history of Howard College, which in 1965 changed its name to Samford University. According to Bass, the "idea" of Howard College emanated from its founders' firm commitment to orthodox Protestantism, the tenets of Scottish philosophy, the British Enlightenment's emphasis on virtue, and the moral reforms of the age. From the Old South, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the New South, Howard College adapted to new conditions while continuing to teach the necessary ingredients to transform young southern men into useful and enlightened Christian citizens. Throughout its history, Howard College faced challenges both within and without. As with other institutions in the South, slavery played a central role in its founding, with most of the college's principal benefactors, organizers, and board of trustees earning financial gains from enslaved labor. The Civil War swept away the college's large endowment and growing student enrollment, and the school never regained a solid financial footing during the subsequent decades--barely surviving bankruptcy and public auction. In 1887, with the continued decline of southern agriculture, Howard College moved to a new campus on the outskirts of Birmingham, where its president, Rev. Benjamin Franklin Riley, a well-known New South economic booster, fought to restore the college's financial health. Despite his best efforts, Howard struggled economically until local bankers offered enough assistance to allow the institution to enter the twentieth century with a measure of financial stability. The challenges and changes wrought by the years transformed Howard College irrevocably. While the original "idea" of the school endured through its classical curriculum, by the 1920s the school had all but lost its connections to John Howard and its founding principles. From Every Stormy Wind That Blows is a fascinating look into this storied institution's history and Samford University's origins.

"The latest in LSU Press's Iconic New Orleans Cocktails series, The French 75 tells the stories of the many lives of this protean cocktail. John Maxwell Hamilton begins his search for the French 75 in Europe, traveling to some of the many locations where it may have originated-yet always recognizing that some version of the French 75 was invented multiple times in multiple places. A century or so after its probable creation, this cocktail arrived at Arnaud's Restaurant and became as entrenched in New Orleans as the famed second line. Hamilton not only explores the kaleidoscopic variety of the French 75 over the years and across continents but also includes several now-iconic recipes for the cocktail"--

The 1968 burning of the Lazy B Stables in Charlotte, North Carolina, attracted little notice beyond coverage in local media. By the mid-1970s, however, the fire had become the center of a contentious and dubious arson case against a trio of Black civil rights activists, who became known as the "Charlotte Three." The charges against the men garnered interest from federal law enforcement agents, investigative journalists-- including one who later earned a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the trials--numerous New Left and Black Power activists, and Amnesty International, which declared the defendants "political prisoners." In Going to Hell to Get the Devil, J. Christopher Schutz offers the first comprehensive examination of this controversial case and its outcome. In the 1960s and 1970s, Charlotte's leaders sought to portray their home as a placid, business-friendly, and racially moderate community. When New Left and Black Power activists threatened that stability, city leaders employed a variety of means to silence them, including the use of law enforcement against African Americans they deemed too zealous. In the Charlotte Three case, prosecutors paid prisoners for testimony against the Black activists on trial, resulting in their convictions with lengthy prison sentences. The unwanted publicity surrounding the case of the Charlotte Three became a critical pivot point in the Queen City's post-World War II trajectory. Going to Hell to Get the Devil tells more than the story of an arson case; it also tells the story of the South's future, as the fate of the Charlotte Three became emblematic of the decline of the African American freedom struggle and the causes it championed.

An American institution, Sun Records has a history with many chapters -- its Memphis origins with visionary Sam Phillips, the breakthrough recordings of Elvis Presley, and the studio's immense influence on the sound of popular music. But behind the company's chart toppers and legendary musicians there exists another story, told by Barbara Barnes Sims. In the male-dominated workforce of the 1950s, 24-year-old Sims found herself thriving in the demanding roles of publicist and sales promotion coordinator at Sun Records. Sims's job placed her in the studio with Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Carl Perkins, and other Sun entertainers, as well as the unforgettable Phillips, whose work made the music that defined an era. The Next Elvis: Searching for Stardom at Sun Records chronicles Sims's career at the studio, a pivotal time at this recording mecca, as she darted from disc jockeys to distributors. Sims not only entertains with personal stories of big personalities, but also brings humor to the challenges of a young woman working in a fast and tough industry. Her disarming narrative ranges from descriptions of a disgraced Jerry Lee Lewis to the remarkable impact and tragic fall of DJ Daddy-O Dewey to the frenzied Memphis homecoming of Elvis after his military service. Collectively, these vignettes offer a rare and intimate look at the people, the city, and the studio that permanently shifted the trajectory of rock 'n' roll.

Manipulating the Masses tells the story of the enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. During the Great War, the federal government exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of American citizens. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), established by President Woodrow Wilson one week after the United States entered the war in April 1917.Driven by its fiery chief, George Creel, the CPI reached every crevice of the nation, every day, and extended widely abroad. It established the first national newspaper, made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing, and pioneered the concept of public diplomacy. It spread the Wilson administration's messages through articles, cartoons, books, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through feature films and volunteer Four Minute Men who spoke during intermission; through posters plastered on buildings and along highways; and through pamphlets distributed by the millions. It enlisted the nation's leading progressive journalists, advertising executives, and artists. It harnessed American universities and their professors to create propaganda and add legitimacy to its mission.Even as Creel insisted that the CPI was a conduit for reliable, fact-based information, the office regularly sanitized news, distorted facts, and played on emotions. Creel extolled transparency but established front organizations. Overseas, the CPI secretly subsidized news organs and bribed journalists. At home, it challenged the loyalty of those who occasionally questioned its tactics. Working closely with federal intelligence agencies eager to sniff out subversives and stifle dissent, the CPI was an accomplice to the Wilson administration's trampling of civil liberties.Until now, the full story of the CPI has never been told. John Maxwell Hamilton consulted over 150 archival collections in the United States and Europe to write this revealing history, which shows the shortcuts to open, honest debate that even well-meaning propagandists take to bend others to their views. Every element of contemporary government propaganda has antecedents in the CPI. It is the ideal vehicle for understanding the rise of propaganda, its methods of operation, and the threat it poses to democracy.

Throughout the decades-long legal battle to end segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, attorney Alexander Pierre Tureaud was one of the most influential figures in Louisiana's courts. A More Noble Cause presents both the powerful story of one man's lifelong battle for racial justice and the very personal biography of a black professional and his family in the Jim Crow-era Louisiana. During a career that spanned more than forty years, A. P. Tureaud was at times the only regularly practicing black attorney in Louisiana. From his base in New Orleans, the civil rights pioneer fought successfully to obtain equal pay for Louisiana's black teachers, to desegregate public accommodations, schools, and buses, and for voting rights of qualified black residents. Tureaud's work, along with that of dozens of other African American lawyers, formed part of a larger legal battle that eventually overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation. This intimate account, based on more than twenty years of research into the attorney's astounding legal and civil rights career as well as his community work, offers the first full-length study of Tureaud. An active organizer of civic and voting leagues, a leader in the NAACP, a national advocate of the Knights of Peter Claver--a fraternal order of black Catholics--and a respected political power broker and social force as a Democrat and member of the Autocrat Club and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Tureaud worked tirelessly within the state and for all those without equal rights. Both an engrossing story of a key legal, political, and community figure during Jim Crow-era Louisiana and a revealing look at his personal life during a tumultuous time in American history, A More Noble Cause provides insight into Tureaud's public struggles and personal triumphs, offering readers a candid account of a remarkable champion of racial equality.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a small group of dedicated dreamers opened the Southern Food & Beverage Museum (SoFAB) to tell the stories of the foods and drinks that have come to define the U.S. South. From its beginnings, SoFAB has focused on discovering, understanding, and celebrating food, drink, and related culture and folklife in America. As the museum grew, its staff and supporters learned to answer the question, "What is southern food?" in new ways that reflected the region's dynamism, its ingenuity in the face of hardship, and the contributions of generations of immigrant communities. The Southern Food & Beverage Museum Cookbook shares recipes particular to each southern state, all created by chefs who feel the connection of home.

"Empty Pedestals: Countering Confederate Monuments through Public Design uses a design perspective to explore how monuments to the Confederacy speak to regionalism, racist agendas, and residual pain. Many public designers and artists engaged in the public realm have created innovative projects to replace Confederate monuments, contextualize those that continue to stand, and foster new conversations about history, race, and justice in America. By drawing lessons from these projects and considering the questions that remain, editors Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming hope to assist design and art educators and students to combat endemic racism and other forms of social division. For well over a century, the endurance of Confederate monuments, street names, and other memorial symbols in the United States has permitted a set of false and oppressive narratives to be defended in the name of 'historic preservation.' Their continuing presence maintains symbolic forms of systemic oppression, exclusionary policies and practices, and erasure of the stories, memories, and values of marginalized communities in the South. While many Confederate monuments have been removed since 2017, those removals comprise only a small percentage of the overall symbolic presence of the Confederate past in the American South. In Empty Pedestals, Boone and Deming strive to find new frameworks and shared solutions for the issues that continue to trouble American social landscapes. Above all, the book lifts up the stories of communities that have confronted Confederate monuments and devised solutions that stand up to, and apart from, old mythologies. When and if oppressive symbols like Confederate monuments are determined not to be worth preserving, the public needs to understand what kind of design alternatives may offer healing in public spaces, healthier social discourse, and stronger community resilience"--

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the "southern outsider" in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors--alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines--before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power. Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

America's Imagined Revolution explores the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to ask narratological, historiographical, and theoretical questions about how slave emancipation has (and has not) been theorized as revolution. Reading historical fiction by authors such as George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois in dialogue with nineteenth-century historical writing--and the era's legal, political, and print culture--Tomos Wallbank-Hughes excavates an evanescent form of historicist writing sensitive to the revolutionary changes that shaped life in the emancipation-era South. As an aesthetic form, the historical novel of Reconstruction poses questions about revolutionary experience in plantation societies, and in the process challenges critical assumptions about historical time in the nineteenth century: How do authors narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment? In what direction does history travel if it does not progress? What narratives of race, class, and region encompass both continued domination and ruptured power? By plumbing the situations that give it form, the historical novel of Reconstruction provides a window into the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which, rather than a storehouse of tradition, the region became a terrain for interpreting social revolution and uncovering slavery's revolutionary afterlives. America's Imagined Revolution offers a new interpretation of the literary and historiographical significance of the Reconstruction period and its relationship to American literary history.

"Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment establishes the centrality of Catholic thought, imagery, and sacrament both to the spiritual outlook of the McCarthy corpus and, more specifically, to its critique of Enlightenment values and their realization in American history. To this end, D. Marcel DeCoste surveys McCarthy's fiction from both his Tennessee and southwestern periods, with chapters devoted to eight of his published novels-from Outer Dark to The Road-and an introduction and coda that offer analyses of two of his dramatic works, along with his final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The argument advanced by DeCoste is twofold. First, his readings demonstrate that McCarthy's work mounts a sustained critique of core Enlightenment values and their bloody results in the American context. Second, he establishes that this critical engagement with American Enlightenment is one enabled by, and articulated through, specifically Catholic teachings on such topics as sacraments, ethics, and material creation. Though other studies trace how McCarthy's fiction dissects such American myths as radical individualism and Manifest Destiny, they do not, at the same time, take up the question of how the fiction's spiritual interests and obtrusive Christian symbolism relate to this critical project. More than merely calling attention to McCarthy's own religious background or his drawing on sacramental language, DeCoste examines the significance of Catholicism to the author's depictions not just of religion and ethics, but of the modernity many critics see McCarthy as critiquing. Throughout Professing Darkness, DeCoste offers extended analysis of McCarthy's engagement with American history and myth, early modern and Enlightenment thought, and Catholic theology, ethics, and sacramentalism"--

A prolific poet as a child, Barbara Drake-Vera loved writing almost as much as she adored her father, a moody postal employee with an elaborate comb-over and a fondness for Mahler. But when her successes sparked his rage, Barbara silenced her voice for years, terrified even to see her name in print. By age forty-nine, she was a professional journalist living in Peru and collaborating with her husband, a Peruvian-born photographer, to report on melting glaciers in the Andes, far from the reach of her father. Melted Away recounts what happens after her father is diagnosed with advancing Alzheimer's and Barbara takes him into her home in Lima, beginning a process of self-discovery that uncovers a path toward personal and family healing. A diverse group of allies support her on this quest: a trio of caregiving women from the provinces, who serve as home-health aides; a mischievous, Cervantes-quoting, nonagenarian suitor; and a stubborn alpaca herder who lives beneath a long-worshipped, life-sustaining Andean glacier now melting from rapid climate change. Candid, poignant, and deeply researched, Melted Away is the true story of how a writer at midlife reclaims her agency, and an ardent plea to care for the planet by embracing collectivism and mutual aid.

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict's similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was "one among many" such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War's place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s. Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time's developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations' insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners--Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation. The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

"Cecily Zander's "The Army under Fire" addresses two essential questions about the Civil War and its aftermath. First, what was the extent of anti-militarism in the Civil War era, and who were its proponents? Second, what consequences did political opposition to the professional army have on the war, Reconstruction, and postbellum western expansion? Zander suggests that the principal promotors of an anti-army ideology were the members of the Republican Party-the same men charged with overseeing the Union war effort between 1861 and 1865, as well as the military reconstruction of the nation in the decade that followed the collapse of the Confederacy. While scholars have long appreciated the Republican Party's anti-slavery roots, this study is the first to argue that anti-slavery attitudes developed in concert with a visceral anti-army ideology. Zander's work contains several historiographical interventions in the fields of Civil War history, nineteenth-century political history, and the history of the American West. She suggests that the Republican Party advanced an anti-army political philosophy in tandem with their anti-slavery ideology. Over almost two decades, they stalled legislation supporting the army, cut military funding, and reduced the institution's size. Zander's work counters narratives of accelerated western expansion supported by a more powerful army after the Civil War. She also advances a revised timeline for Reconstruction, suggesting that Republicans rapidly reduced their interest in supporting that policy in the South via military force between 1870 and 1872, which means the party's ideological commitment to the national reunification project ended four years earlier than the traditional date of 1876. Historians interested in the middle decades of the nineteenth century are likely to find "Republicans and Regulars in the Civil War Era" worthy of attention, especially scholars invested in the debates surrounding the chronological and geographic reframing of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Because of the notoriety of many of the work's most important characters-from Jefferson Davis and William Seward to Thaddeus Stevens and Zachariah Chandler, as well as William Tecumseh Sherman, Phillip Sheridan, and Ulysses S. Grant-general readers are also likely to be interested in this study"--

"J. Matthew Ward's Garden of Ruins is a social and military history of Civil War-era Louisiana. Delving deep into primary sources, Ward examines military occupation and state coercion from Union and Confederate authorities, concluding that despite the revolutionary potential of occupation, it was a conservative state mechanism that replicated much of the antebellum social order in the state. He suggests that social stability during wartime, and ultimately victory itself, developed from the capacity of military powers to secure their territory, governing powers, and civilian populations. White and Black residents, in turn, pressed Union and Confederate powers for supplies, security, and redress of grievances. Union troops occupied southern Louisiana beginning in May 1862, expanding their reach for the remainder of the war. During that occupation, Union forces relied on a comprehensive occupation structure that included military actions, social regulations, destabilization of slavery, and the creation of a complex bureaucracy. Struggles between Union forces and civilians, Ward suggests, reveal how occupation became a war on southern households and culture. Before occupation and in unoccupied regions of Louisiana, he shows that little functional difference existed between Confederate governmental and military forces. By examining the coercive policies of the state's Confederate government alongside civilian efforts to patrol the loyalty of their communities, Ward concludes that the Confederate war effort was also a joint production, one that urges historians to consider warfare as more than battles and strategy-it was a social event that revealed the underlying connections between people and state. Garden of Ruins reveals the Civil War, state-building, and democracy itself as contingent processes through which Louisianans shaped the world around them. It also shows that power during the conflict and immediately afterward was a collaborative production between occupying military forces and civilians. Ward's study is certain to be of interest to historians and general readers interested in the Civil War homefront in Louisiana"--

"Despite several decades of scholarship on African diasporic religion, Voodoo remains understudied by academics. The extent of recent book-length studies of the topic are sparse due primarily to Voodoo's fragmentary documentary record. Moreover, earlier works, such [as] 'Hoodoo in American' (1931) by Zora Neale Hurston and 'Voodoo in New Orleans' (1946) by Robert Tallant, are error- and fabrication-prone and in dire need of updating. In ... 'Voodoo,' Jeffrey E. Anderson presents a modern account of the religion as it existed in the Mississippi River valley from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century, when he argues that it ceased to exist as a living tradition. Anderson begins by examining Voodoo's origin as a creole faith shaped by several African, European, Native American, and Caribbean influences. Next, he explores the deities of Voodoo and their place in Voodoo spirituality, using them to analyze the religion's origins. After discussing the gods, he turns to those who served them and how they interacted with the divine through religious ritual and magic. In discussing the formation and operation of the religion, Anderson explains why and when it disappeared as a living faith as well as its legacy in the region. He concludes by addressing issues of cultural politics in the form of competing claims of authority over the interpretation of the religion. An appendix also includes a collection and translation (when possible) of Voodoo songs for the benefit of future researchers. Anderson's study provides a solid scholarly foundation for future work by systematizing the extant information on a religion that has long captured the popular imagination while simultaneously being seen as variously threatening, evil, and/or laughable. His work is the most complete account of the faith yet produced and rests on more than two decades worth of research on the topic, which included standard primary source research alongside field study in New Orleans, Haiti, Cuba, Senegal, Benin, Togo, and the Republic of Congo. The result is an enduring resource on Mississippi Valley Voodoo, Louisiana, and the African Diaspora"

In this compelling new study, Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown chart the rise and fall of the Zouave uniform, the nineteenth century's most important military fashion fad for men and women on both sides of the Atlantic. Originating in French colonial Algeria, the uniform was characterized by an open, collarless jacket, baggy trousers, and a fez. As Harrison and Brown demonstrate, the Zouaves embraced ethnic, racial, and gender crossing, liberating themselves from the strictures of bourgeois society. Some served as soldiers in Papal Rome, the United States, the British West Indies, and Brazil, while others acted in theatrical performances that combined drag and drill. Zouave Theaters analyzes the interaction of the stage and the military, and reveals that the Zouave persona influenced visual artists from painters and photographers to illustrators and filmmakers.

"Biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers knew the novelist James Salter (1925-2015) during the last decade of his life, visited him twice on Long Island, and received eighty letters from him. Meyers's friendship and knowledge of Salter's life provide many new insights about the personal, cultural, and historical background of his work. This appreciative book, the first full-length study in twenty-six years, is intended to introduce Salter to new readers, and to show his achievement as a writer of novels, stories, screenplays, memoirs, and travel essays. Salter had an extraordinary range of experience as West Point graduate; fighter pilot in the Korean War; downhill skier, rock climber, and mountain climber; screenwriter and film director; connoisseur of food and wine; world traveler and sophisticated observer. Across eleven chapters, Meyers discusses Salter's family and friends; the significance of his book and chapter titles; characters' names and cultural allusions; literary influences, especially Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald; development of his fictional style and techniques; awareness of weather and light; supreme delineation of sexual ecstasy; recurrent themes of war and love; strange career and late recognition. A detailed chronology tracks key dates and events in Salter's life, while a chronological bibliography shows the development of his literary reputation. For Meyers, Salter's lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed in contemporary literature. This elegant blend of biography, literary criticism, and memoir reveals why"--

"In Hemingway's Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction, John Beall examines in close detail two of the author's vignettes from the first version of In Our Time and ten of his short stories, with an extensive focus on manuscripts and typescripts, as part of a broader examination of how Ernest Hemingway crafted his distinctive prose through a rigorous process of revision. The first three chapters discuss the influence of Hemingway's three most important modernist mentors: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The first chapter focuses on Pound's influence as the editor of the Inquest Series, of which Hemingway's in our time was the final publication. The second chapter examines the affinities between Joyce's "The Sisters" and Hemingway's "Indian Camp." In particular, Beall develops the case for Joyce's influence on Hemingway's decision to revise the story to maintain the reader's focus on young Nick Adams's point of view in his first encounter with death. Chapter three explores Hemingway's revisions of "Cat in the Rain" as reflecting the influence of Stein's novellas and sketches, as well as that of Joyce's stories and novels. The remaining chapters delve into the artistry of Hemingway's extensive revisions in later masterpieces from "Big Two-Hearted River" to "Fathers and Sons." Beall's discussion of "Big Two-Hearted River" shows that Hemingway's revisions were not simply cuts and omissions, but included several paragraphs that he added to slow down the narrative and represent Nick Adams's careful observations of a kingfisher and trout as he watched their shadows on the river. The chapter on "The Battler" and "The Killers" explores the extent to which Hemingway's revisions brought racial conflicts to the forefront of each story and portrayed Bugs and Sam as guides for Nick Adams. A subsequent reading of the story "Now I Lay Me" shows that, in rewriting the story, Hemingway developed his portrait of Nick Adams as a writer making up imaginary rivers to cope with the traumas of childhood and war. A chapter on "A Way You'll Never Be" focuses on how Hemingway's revisions developed crucial story elements-including Nick's interior monologues, manic lecture about grasshoppers, and wacky sense of humor-that showed the character restoring a sense of emotional balance despite his memories of being wounded in World War I. Subsequent chapters on "Fathers and Sons," "Indian Camp," "Hills Like White Elephants," "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," and the concluding chapter, in part focused on drafts of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," offer new discussions of the author's process of revision based on his manuscripts and typescripts published in the Hemingway Library Edition. In the end, by drawing attention to the meticulous edits, additions, and deletions that helped shape these texts, Beall reveals how extensively and richly Hemingway revised his drafts while composing some of his most powerful short fiction. Hemingway's Art of Revision gives a detailed view of a great prose stylist at work"--

"Ben Wynne's "A Hound Dog Tale" is a detailed history of the rock-and-roll standard "Hound Dog." Citing its original release and reception as a turning point in American popular culture, he reveals how the song reflected American society through issues of race, gender, and generational conflict. The story is compelling. Two white Jewish teenagers from New York and Baltimore who fantasized about being Black wrote "Hound Dog." They gave it to Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, a three-hundred-pound African American female blues belter from Alabama who was as talented as she was intimidating. "Big Mama" made the song a hit in the Black entertainment marketplace. After that, a white Las Vegas lounge singer from Philadelphia rewrote many of the lyrics and recorded an updated version. Not long afterward, an aspiring white Mississippi singer and guitar player named Elvis Presley recorded that version of the song and turned "Hound Dog" (and himself) into a global phenomenon. As Wynne points out, "Hound Dog" crossed the color line repeatedly: Black and white artists who grew up in a rigidly segregated society performed and recorded it. His history of the song includes treatments of the artists who recorded its most well-known versions-"Big Mama" Thornton and Elvis-along with the comings and goings of many others involved in the tune's story. The cast of characters is large and eclectic, including singers, songwriters, and musicians from the worlds of R&B, rock-and-roll, and country music, both honest and unscrupulous record producers and managers, famous television hosts, a couple of lawyers, and even a gangster or two. "Hound Dog" ties all these people together against dramatically changing times during the 1950s. "A Hound Dog Tale" is sure to be of interest to historians who study American cultural history, the 1950s, R&B, and rock-and-roll, or the role of race in American popular music. In addition, R&B, blues, and rock-and-roll music enthusiasts in the United States and abroad will be interested, as will many of the countless fans of Elvis Presley"--

"New Orleans is a city of contradictions: comedy and tragedy, sacred and secular, profound and profane; steeped heavily in tradition and religion yet drenched in decadence and debauchery. New Orleans Unmasked reveals the city's rebellious and humorous spirit, which celebrates life in the face of disaster and death. In this street-level tableau of New Orleans culture, photographer Cheryl Gerber portrays the city's rich and famous while paying homage to the everyday people who make life so special in her hometown. Colorful shots of Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, second lines, and other iconic moments of New Orleans culture are juxtaposed with images of the homelessness, crime, and racism that are equally central to life in the Crescent City. Other image pairings depict Southern Decadence revelers clashing with religious protesters, Catholic traditions merging with voodoo, and New Orleanians from all walks of life expressing themselves through satire and parody. Gerber also pays tribute to departed icons of New Orleans life, celebrating the funerals (and legacies) or Pete Fountain, Chef Leah Chase, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, and many more. In New Orleans Unmasked, Gerber weaves an indelible narrative of the city's transformation since its racial reckoning, glaringly exposed during Hurricane Katrina. Though racial and class divisions still linger, Gerber makes one thing certain: "No matter our stations in life, no matter our dark and cruel history, we know that disaster and death unite us all.""--

" 'The Limits of the Lost Cause' is a collection of essays that challenge the prevailing ways of thinking about the impact of the Civil War on the American South. Foster's introduction provides a comprehensive overview of scholarship on the Lost Cause and Civil War memory that highlights the emergence of two ways of thinking about these topics: an older one, pioneered by C. Vann Woodward, that made a case for a southern identity shaped by defeat and guilt; and a more recent one, prevalent not only in current scholarship but in the press and public discussion, that suggests the South is still fighting the Civil War."--

The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender. By employing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century first-hand accounts of Voodoo practitioners and their rituals, Roberts provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced Voodoo and why. Voodoo in New Orleans, a melange of religion, entrepreneurship, and business networks, stretched across the color line in intriguing ways. Roberts's analysis demonstrates that what united professional practitioners, or "workers," with those who sought their services was not a racially uniform folk culture, but rather the power and influence that Voodoo promised. Recognizing that social immobility proved a common barrier for their patrons, workers claimed that their rituals could overcome racial and gendered disadvantages and create new opportunities for their clients. Voodoo rituals and institutions also drew inspiration from the surrounding milieu, including the privations of the Great Depression, the city's complex racial history, and the free-market economy. Money, employment, and business became central concerns for the religion's practitioners: to validate their work, some began operating from recently organized "Spiritual Churches," entities that were tax exempt and thus legitimate in the eyes of the state of Louisiana. Practitioners even leveraged local figures like the mythohistoric Marie Laveau for spiritual purposes and entrepreneurial gain. All the while, they contributed to the cultural legacy that fueled New Orleans's tourist industry and drew visitors and their money to the Crescent City.