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"Killed in action at the famous Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston stands as the highest-ranking Civil War soldier to perish in battle. He is also the highest-ranking American military officer ever to die in combat. His unexpected death had cascading negative ramifications on the Confederate war effort, especially in the Western Theater, where his absence created a void in adequate leadership. Johnston's experiences before the war are a window into the factors that compelled men like him to volunteer to fight to preserve slavery. Surprisingly, there have been only two major biographies of Johnston, one by his son in the 1870s and another by historian Charles P. Roland in the 1960s. In "The Iron Dice of Battle," prolific Civil War historian Timothy Smith reexamines Johnston's life and death, reaching new conclusions about both. According to Smith, as a commander, Johnston constantly faced larger and better-armed Union forces, which dramatically shaped his command decisions, turning him into a strategic gambler. Over and over, he noted that his strategy was essentially a roll of the dice. Johnston's personality was anything but that of a gambler, making choices that required quick and bold bluffs or audacious enemy engagement at odds with his inclinations. Nevertheless, he gambled with his life and troops throughout his command. The final wager came with his army at Shiloh in April 1862. He had alerted his troops that "we must this day conquer or perish," and he perished instead of conquered. His death came amid a desperate gamble to mold the fighting the way he needed it to go; in doing so, he charged ahead to lead from the front and fell mortally wounded. The first volume to examine Johnston's life and career in detail in nearly sixty years, "The Iron Dice of Battle" builds on modern scholarship to provide a new and incisive analysis of not only Johnston's life but, more importantly, his Confederate command and the effect his death had on the remainder of the Civil War in the West"--

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

"Over 170 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe remains a figure of enduring fascination and speculation for readers, scholars, and devotees of the weird and macabre. In Fallen Angel, acclaimed novelist and poet Robert Morgan offers a new biography of this gifted, complicated author. Focusing on Poe's personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics. Though he died at age forty, Poe left behind works of great originality and vision that Fallen Angel explores with depth and feeling"--

Behind the historical accounts of the great men of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lies the almost forgotten story of the black women who not only participated in the organization but actually helped it thrive in the early twentieth-century South. In Invisible Activists, Lee Sartain examines attitudes toward gender, class, and citizenship of African American activists in Louisiana and women's roles in the campaign for civil rights in the state. In the end, he argues, it was women working behind the scenes in Louisiana's branches of the NAACP who were the most crucial factor in the organization's efficiency and survival. During the first half of the twentieth century -- especially in the darkest days of the Great Depression, when membership waned and funds were scarce -- a core group of women maintained Louisiana's NAACP. Fighting on the front line, Sartain explains, women acted as grassroots organizers, running public relations campaigns and membership drives, mobilizing youth groups, and promoting general community involvement. Using case studies of several prominent female NAACP members in Louisiana, Sartain demonstrates how women combined their fundraising skills with an extensive network of community and family ties to fund the NAACP and, increasingly, to undertake the day-to-day operations of the local organizations themselves. Still, these women also struggled against the double obstacles of racism and sexism that prevented them from attaining the highest positions within NAACP branch leadership. Sartain illustrates how the differences between the sexes were ultimately woven into the political battle for racial justice, where women were viewed as having inherent moral superiority and, hence, the potential to lift the black population as a whole. Sartain concludes that despite the societal traditions that kept women out of leadership positions, in the early stages of the civil rights movement, their skills and their contributions as community matriarchs provided the keys to the organization's progress. Highly original and essential to a comprehensive study of the NAACP, Invisible Activists gives voice to the many individual women who sustained the influential civil rights organization during a time of severe racial oppression in Louisiana. Without such dedication, Sartain asserts, the organization would have had no substantial presence in the state.

Finalist for the Lincoln Prize! Traditional histories of the Civil War describe the conflict as a war between North and South. Kenneth W. Noe suggests it should instead be understood as a war between the North, the South, and the weather. In The Howling Storm, Noe retells the history of the conflagration with a focus on the ways in which weather and climate shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns. He further contends that events such as floods and droughts affecting the Confederate home front constricted soldiers' food supply, lowered morale, and undercut the government's efforts to boost nationalist sentiment. By contrast, the superior equipment and open supply lines enjoyed by Union soldiers enabled them to cope successfully with the South's extreme conditions and, ultimately, secure victory in 1865. Climate conditions during the war proved unusual, as irregular phenomena such as El Niño, La Niña, and similar oscillations in the Atlantic Ocean disrupted weather patterns across southern states. Taking into account these meteorological events, Noe rethinks conventional explanations of battlefield victories and losses, compelling historians to reconsider long-held conclusions about the war. Unlike past studies that fault inflation, taxation, and logistical problems for the Confederate defeat, his work considers how soldiers and civilians dealt with floods and droughts that beset areas of the South in 1862, 1863, and 1864. In doing so, he addresses the foundational causes that forced Richmond to make difficult and sometimes disastrous decisions when prioritizing the feeding of the home front or the front lines. The Howling Storm stands as the first comprehensive examination of weather and climate during the Civil War. Its approach, coverage, and conclusions are certain to reshape the field of Civil War studies.

Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement's use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett's Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions. Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement's seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer. By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.

"From its looming above-ground cemeteries to the ghosts believed to haunt its stately homes, New Orleans is a city deeply entwined with death, the undead, and the supernatural. City of the Undead explains how the Big Easy came to be synonymous with the paranormal in the form of ghosts, vampires, and Voodoo Queens. The reasons behind New Orleans's reputation as America's most haunted city are numerous. Its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River grants it a liminal status between water and land, while its stately oaks and Spanish moss create an eerie beauty. The ever-mixing blend of spiritual beliefs from Native American, African, African American, Caribbean, and European cultures resulted in a unique ferment of the paranormal. Elaborate cemeteries and ornate architecture, an extremely high death rate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a long history of enslavement and oppression laid the groundwork for a cultural scene friendly to stories of Voodoo, ghosts, and vampires. Robin Roberts explores representations of three specific supernatural figures: the Voodoo Queen, the ghost, and the vampire. Reviewing the historical bases for these figures, she examines nonfiction, fiction, TV and film, and walking tours to discover how stories of the supernatural can bring attention to the injustices that have faced, and continue to face, marginalized groups in the city. City of the Undead shows how these supernatural figures relate to each other, what function they serve in the greater fabric of the city, and why New Orleans developed and continues to cherish its reputation as a site for the supernatural. It's a city that reminds us of the possibility of life after death and assures us that resistance to injustice need not end in the grave"--

""Confederate Privateer" is a comprehensive account of the brief life and exploits of John Yates Beall of Virginia, 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 witness and a militia participant in the trial of John Brown and his 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. After recovering partly from his wound, Beall signed on with Stonewall Jackson's army. However, his weakened physical condition prevented him from joining the unit. Still seeking an active role in the Confederate cause, he traveled to the Midwest and then to Canada, where, among escaped rebel prisoners of war, he developed an elaborate plan for Confederate operations on the Great Lakes. After making his way to Richmond, Beall laid his plan before Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory, who commissioned him an acting master in the Confederate navy. 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 in or under the protection of the United States Navy. For his part in organizing the raids, Beall became known as the "Terror of the Chesapeake." After United States forces captured Beall and his men, the War Department prepared to try them as pirates, a hanging offense. When the Davis administration threatened to execute the same number of Union prisoners, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton backed down. Freed in a later prisoner exchange, Beall returned to the Great Lakes and organized another privateering operation. After some early successes on the water, Beall hatched a plan to derail a passenger train transporting Confederate prisoners of war near Niagara, New York. Captured before he could carry out the mission, the Union army charged Beall with conspiracy, found him guilty, sentenced him to death, and executed him. Harris's history of Beall offers a new lens on paramilitary efforts by civilians to support the Confederacy. It also sheds light on the South's secret operations in neutral Canada to thwart the Union. Though little remembered today, Beall was a famous and heroic figure in the Civil War South. Indeed, so much so that his execution was on John Wilkes Booth's list of reasons to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Based on exhaustive primary and secondary sources and placed in the context of more extensive Confederate guerrilla operations, especially in Canada, "Confederate Privateer" is sure to be of interest to Civil War scholars and general readers interested in the conflict"--

"Born in a provincial city in the Peruvian Andes, the Franciscan linguist and theologian Luis Gerâonimo de Orâe (1554-1630) lived during a critical period in the formation of the modern world, as the global empire of Spain engaged in a nearly continuous struggle over resources and religion. In the first full-length biography of Orâe, Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook reconstruct the friar's life and the communities in which he circulated, tracing the career of this first-generation Creole from his roots in Huamanga to his work in Andean missions, his activities at the royal courts of Spain and throughout Spanish America, until his final years as bishop of Concepciâon, Chile. While serving in Peru's Colca Valley, Orâe composed multilingual texts, translating doctrinal concepts into the indigenous languages Quechua and Aymara, alongside Latin and Spanish, which missionaries and secular clergy frequently used in their conversion efforts. As commissioner to Cuba and La Florida, he inspected the frontier missions along the coast of what became the southeastern United States and wrote an influential history of these outposts and their environment. After Philip III dispatched him to Concepciâon, Orâe spent his last years working in the southernmost end of the Americas, where he continued his advocacy for indigenous justice and engaged in heated arguments with the governor over defensive war, royal patronage, and Indian enslavement. Drawn from research conducted in Spain and Latin America over several decades, this consequential biography recovers from obscurity a colonial friar whose legacy continues in the Andean world today"--

"In Speed, Safety, and Comfort: The Origins of Delta Air Lines, former Delta Boeing 767 captain and aviation historian James John Hoogerwerf traces the evolution and growth of one of America's most successful airlines. Delta's story began during the early twentieth century with the fight against the cotton-devouring boll weevil, which devastated the southern economy and compelled scientists to formulate calcium arsenate powder to eradicate the invasive pest. To aid in the elimination effort, Huff Daland Dusters, a military aircraft manufacturer, constructed the first plane specifically designed to dispense the poison from the air. The crop duster proved so effective that the company rebranded as Delta Air Service in 1925, focusing more on providing commercial services, including the transport of government mail and a variety of goods. Four years later, Delta began flying its first passengers from its hub in Monroe, Louisiana, eventually establishing routes crisscrossing the southeastern United States. By the eve of World War II, the firm had assumed the familiar Delta Air Lines name and boasted forward-thinking management, a modern fleet of aircraft, and increased revenue from passenger ticket sales. Now headquartered in Atlanta, Delta counts itself among the oldest and largest airlines in the world, with nearly 90,000 employees and more than 5,400 flights per day. Delta's expansion and survival are anomalies in an industry historically dominated by government and special interests. Hoogerwerf's masterful history of Delta's beginnings underscores the company's contribution to agriculture, southern industrialization, and the development of commercial aviation in the United States"--

"Timothy Buckner's The Barber of Natchez Reconsidered uses William Johnson's life to demonstrate how Black men asserted their masculinity in the nineteenth century. Johnson, a wealthy free Black barber in Natchez, Mississippi, kept a diary from 1835 until his death in 1851. Published a hundred years later by LSU Press, William Johnson's Natchez (1951) is considered by historians to be among the most important sources on free Black life in the antebellum South. The diary inspired numerous studies of Johnson's life, including the influential The Barber of Natchez (LSU Press, 1953), by Edwin A. Davis and William R. Hogan. The study and others established Johnson as an anomaly in the old South: a free man of color who held himself separate from other African Americans through slave-owning and internalizing white ideas about racial prejudice. Using recent scholarship on Black masculinity as an essential new lens to reexamine Johnson, Buckner suggests that earlier interpretations failed to understand the complexity of his life. While Johnson's profession as a barber allowed him to achieve acceptance and respectability, it also required him to be subservient to the needs of his all-white clientele. As Buckner shows, that does not mean that Johnson was only concerned with acceptance by whites or that he held himself apart from Natchez's Blacks. Instead, the sources on Johnson's life reveal a man deeply connected to and supportive of the broader African American community while catering to the whims of whites for economic and social survival. In the antebellum South, being a man required a public performance. As Buckner reveals, Johnson participated in that performance to a degree not seen in recent studies of Black masculinity. Outside his working hours, he competed with other men, white and Black, free and enslaved, in various masculine pursuits, especially gambling, hunting, and fishing. Johnson's barbershop was a prime location for witnessing and gossiping about the many fights in Natchez's notoriously violent streets. By making connections based on a shared sense of manliness, Johnson also found ways to engage with whites in civic matters and even challenged them on party politics via non-threatening means. Like many other free Black men, he asserted his manliness in ways beyond just rebelling against slavery. Buckner's long overdue reinterpretation of Johnson's life is a welcome addition to the LSU Press list that will serve as a needed corrective to earlier works about him"--

"Peter Adams's The Insurrectionist is the first comprehensive biography of Major General Edwin A. Walker, a figure who, in the 1950s and 1960s, became a leader of a far-right political movement known for its elaborate conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and uncompromising white supremacy. Sixty years before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Edwin Walker was charged with insurrection and seditious conspiracy. He was arrested on orders from the attorney general after leading a deadly riot against federal marshals as they protected the first African American student attempting to register at the University of Mississippi. Those who flocked to Walker's side believed an invisible government working with coconspirators in the Kremlin and United Nations would soon enslave America under a one-world dictatorship. Walker's deep state conspiracy theory has echoed through American political culture into the age of QAnon, finding a new home among today's far-right extremists."--Provided by publisher.

"Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Transforming the American Mind is an interdisciplinary volume of literary and cultural scholarship that examines the link between two pivotal intellectual and artistic figures, probing how the author's writings influenced the architect's campaign against dominant strains of American thought. Inspired by Emerson's writings on the need to align exterior expression with interior self, Wright believed that architecture was not first and foremost a matter of accommodating spatial needs, but a tool to restore intellectual and artistic freedom, long lost in the process of modernization. Ayad Rahmani shows that Emerson's writings provide an avenue for interpreting Wright's complex approach to country and architecture. The two thinkers cohered around a common concern for a nation derailed by forces that were not only nefarious, but which also flew in the face of the country's original promise. In Emerson's condemnations of slavery and inequality, Wright found inspiration for seeking redress against the humiliations suffered by the modern worker, be it at the hands of an industrial manager or office boss. His designs sought to challenge dehumanizing labor practices and open minds to the beauty and science of agriculture and the natural world. Emerson's example helped Wright develop architecture that aimed less at accommodating a culture of clients and more at raising national historical awareness while also arguing for humane and equitable policies. As evidence of these interventions, Rahmani details the genesis of recent developments in urban agriculture, rooftop gardens, and cohousing. Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a new approach to two vital thinkers whose impact on American society remains evident to this day"--

"Cassander L. Smith's Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term "respectability politics" refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to combat negative stereotypes about their subject group and gain cultural visibility. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behavior of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, or celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of this complicated relationship between race and respectability, Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with respectability politics from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns for Black African character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of early Black Atlantic cultures, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries"--

"The story of the fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is well known. Indeed, so much so that many scholars do not question its established history. In Conflict in Command, acclaimed Civil War historian George C. Rable rethinks that stance, providing a new understanding of the interaction between the President and his leading wartime general. He does so not by uncovering striking new evidence but instead by reinterpreting their relationship by focusing on its politics. Rable pays considerable attention to Lincoln's cabinet, the Congress, and newspaper editors, revealing the role each played in shaping relations between the men. While he deals with McClellan's military campaigns as the commander of the Army of the Potomac, his focus is on the political fallout rather than the minutia of battlefield actions. This broadly conceived political approach to the story brings in both officers and enlisted men in the Army of the Potomac as citizen-soldiers and political actors. Although there are two short books on the Lincoln-McClellan relationship, most accounts of the men focus on either one or the other, and the vast majority adopt a strongly pro-Lincoln position. Taking a far more neutral stance, Rable analyzes how the relationship between the two men developed politically and ultimately failed spectacularly, profoundly altering the course of the Civil War. As he deftly shows, the political aspects of the interactions between Lincoln and McClellan provide a much fuller understanding of their relationship. Rable's innovative study is sure to be of widespread interest to Civil War scholars and presidential historians"--

"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, non-sectarian 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 over sixteen hundred parentless children and two dozen widows from the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the mid-South. Based on deep archival research and numerous interviews of home alumni and their descendants, Most Fortunate Unfortunates provides a view of life in the 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 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"--

Rethinking American Disasters is a pathbreaking collection of essays on hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other calamities in the United States and British colonial America over four centuries. Proceeding from the premise that there is no such thing as a "natural" disaster, the collection invites readers to consider disasters and their aftermaths as artifacts of and vantage points onto their historical contexts.

For decades, military historians have argued that the introduction of the rifle musket-with a range five times longer than that of the smoothbore musket-made the shoulder-to-shoulder formations of linear tactics obsolete. Author Earl J. Hess challenges this deeply entrenched assumption. He contends that long-range rifle fire did not dominate Civil War battlefields or dramatically alter the course of the conflict because soldiers had neither the training nor the desire to take advantage of the musket rifle's increased range. Drawing on the drill manuals available to officers and a close reading of battle reports, Civil War Infantry Tactics demonstrates that linear tactics provided the best formations and maneuvers to use with the single-shot musket, whether rifle or smoothbore. The linear system was far from an outdated relic that led to higher casualties and prolonged the war. Indeed, regimental officers on both sides of the conflict found the formations and maneuvers in use since the era of the French Revolution to be indispensable to the survival of their units on the battlefield. The training soldiers received in this system, combined with their extensive experience in combat, allowed small units a high level of articulation and effectiveness. Unlike much military history that focuses on grand strategies, Hess zeroes in on formations and maneuvers (or primary tactics), describing their purpose and usefulness in regimental case studies, and pinpointing which of them were favorites of unit commanders in the field. The Civil War was the last conflict in North America to see widespread use of the linear tactical system, and Hess convincingly argues that the war also saw the most effective tactical performance yet in America's short history.

"No Louisiana leader has been more closely associated with Louisiana State University than Governor and U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, who devoted the last five years of his life to turning the small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From the time he declared himself the 'official thief' for LSU in 1930 to his death in September 1935, the school's budget flourished, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty grew in numbers and reputation, and its student body tripled. During this time, no university in the South experienced more growth in size and stature than LSU--and Long's enthusiasm for the school was behind almost every aspect of it. In addition to improving LSU's academic reputation, Long also believed its future and its national visibility were tied to the success of the school's football team and its band. Not an avid football fan before 1930, Long took an intense interest in the LSU Tigers. He attended home games and many out-of-town games. He gave pre-game and halftime pep talks to players. He devised plays and stalked the sidelines during games. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two band directors and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, 'Touchdown for LSU,' still played today. During Long's time as governor, the school's president--who later went to prison for misusing university funds--answered to Long as much as to the LSU Board of Supervisors. While he rarely meddled in academic affairs of the university, Long did insist that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from 'his school' opposed him, retribution was swift. Kingfish U is the story of Huey Long's intense and active involvement with LSU from 1928 through 1935. It also chronicles Long's lingering legacy at LSU, including the school's hyper-politicized governance and the importance of football to the school's political capital and public standing"

"F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, at the young age of twenty-eight. Despite this extraordinary early achievement, Fitzgerald finished just one novel in the next (and last) fifteen years of his life, ending as a mostly unemployed Hollywood screenwriter. Taking Things Hard reveals the story behind the now-iconic Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald's struggle to write anything that matched its brilliance. Robert R. Garnett's new biographical study of Fitzgerald's life and work begins by constructing a portrait of the young man who would wholly and uniquely pour himself into writing Gatsby. In the years following its publication, Fitzgerald continued penning stories, some of them among his finest, yet it took him nine years to complete another novel. The downward trajectory of his career had interweaving causes, among them arrogance, irresponsibility, his troubled marriage to Zelda Sayre, financial improvidence, and a destructive alcoholism. At the root of it all, though, lingered the simple fact that Fitzgerald's most intense and profound experiences had come early, during his truncated undergraduate years at Princeton and the months following his February 1919 discharge from the army. Taking Things Hard provides a fresh look at the imaginative sources of Fitzgerald's fiction and considers the elements, drawn from the keen impressions and salient emotions of its author's youth, that make Gatsby a book that still speaks powerfully to readers"--

"Focusing on the crucial period of 1820 to 1860, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster examines the strong economic bonds between the antebellum plantation South and the burgeoning city of New York that resulted from the highly lucrative trade in cotton. In this richly detailed work of literary and cultural history, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. charts how the partnership brought fantastic wealth to both the South and Gotham during the first half of the nineteenth century. That mutually beneficial alliance also cemented New York's reputation as the northern metropolis most supportive of and hospitable to southerners. Both parties initially found the commercial and cultural entente advantageous, but their collaboration grew increasingly fraught by the 1840s as rising abolitionist sentiment in the North decried the system of chattel slavery that made possible the mass production of cotton. In an effort to stem the swelling tide of abolitionism, conservative southerners demanded absolute political fealty to their peculiar institution from the city that had profited most from the cotton trade. By 1861, reactionary circles in the South viewed New York's failure to extend such unalloyed validation as the betrayal of an erstwhile ally that in the words of one polemicist deemed Gotham worthy of being "blotted from the list of cities." Drawing on contemporary letters, diaries, fiction, and travel writings, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster provides the first detailed study of the complicated relationship between the antebellum South and New York City in the decades leading up to the Civil War"--

Robert Emmett Curran's masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war. Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition of equality set down by its founders. Ultimately, Curran concludes, the revolution that the war touched off remained unfinished, indeed was turned backward, in no small part by Catholics who marred their pursuit of equality with a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization.

"Founded in 1917, Paramount Records was but one of the home-grown record labels of the New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL), a subsidiary of a chair company in Wisconsin with operations near Lake Michigan. No outsized hopes were pinned to Paramount or its sister companies; its founders knew nothing of the music business, the records themselves were only to drive sales of expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing. Lacking both the resources and the interest to compete for top talent, Paramount's earliest recordings were gained little foothold with the listening public. By 1922, on the threshold of bankruptcy, Paramount embarked on a new business plan that had recently proven successful for other record companies: selling the music of Black artists to Black audiences. Advertising in newspapers dedicated to Black readership and utilizing other strategies such as local talent scouts and sales agents in the South, unconventional distribution channels, an 'open door' recording policy, direct mail order and the eventual hiring of the first Black record executive in a white-owned record company, Paramount expanded its footprint and eventually garnered many of the biggest selling titles in the 'race records' era. By the time it ceased operations in 1932, NYRL had pressed and shipped hundreds of thousands of records, including more than 2,300 recordings of blues, gospel and jazz in its Paramount 'race' series alone, with a slate of performers including the likes of Louis Armstrong, Charley Patton, Ethel Waters, Son House, Fletcher Henderson, Skip James, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, King Oliver, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. In short, Paramount accidentally accomplished what others could not. On the one hand, Scott Blackwood's The Rise and Fall of Paramount is the story of happenstance. But it is also a tale about the sheer force of the Great Migration and the legacy of the music put down into the shellacked grooves of a 78 record: Black America finding its voice. It is the story the legacy of the Great Migration and how blues, jazz, and folk music transcended boundaries, and how this almost never happened. Blackwood brings to life these many moments-through creative nonfiction-and makes present and full-blooded what hadn't been brought to life before"--

"A Brief Moment in the Sun is the first scholarly biography of Francis Lewis Cardozo, one of the most talented and influential African Americans to hold elected office in the South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Born to a formerly enslaved African American mother and white Jewish father in antebellum South Carolina, Cardozo led a life of extraordinary achievement as a pioneering educator, politician, and government official. However, today he is largely unknown in South Carolina and among students of nineteenth-century American history. Immediately after the Civil War, Cardozo succeeded in creating and leading a successful school for formerly enslaved children in the face of widespread racial hostility. Between 1868 and 1877, voters elected him secretary of state and state treasurer. In the Republican administrations that controlled the state during Reconstruction, Cardozo was a famously honest officeholder when many of his colleagues were notoriously corrupt. He played a major part in securing a viable educational system for Black and white children and land reform for thousands of landless families. Cardozo proved that Black men could govern at least as well as white. As a result, he became the target of white supremacist Democratic politicians after they reclaimed power through a campaign of violence and intimidation. They prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned Cardozo on a fabricated fraud charge. Pardoned in 1879, Cardozo moved to Washington DC, where he led an even more successful school for African American children. Neil Kinghan's Brief Moment in the Sun is the first complete historical analysis of Francis Cardozo and his contribution to Reconstruction and African American history. It draws on original research on Cardozo's early life and education in Scotland and England and pulls together for the first time the extant sources on his experiences in South Carolina and Washington, DC. Kinghan reveals all that Cardozo achieved as a Black educator and political leader and explores what else he might have realized if white racism and violence had not ended his efforts in South Carolina. Above all, Kinghan shows that Francis Cardozo deserves a place of honor and distinction in the history of nineteenth-century America"--

"When Bad Men Combine is the first full-length scholarly work to examine the notorious Star Route scandal, which roiled American politics in the 1870s and 1880s. With its dramatic twists and turns, the scandal captured the nation's attention for the better part of a decade. Newspaper headlines throughout the country bore headlines decrying "Fraud at Its Finest" and the "Slickest of Swindles." The scandal itself centered on manipulating Western postal delivery contracts by cunning entrepreneurs and their accomplices within what was then known as the Post Office Department. It reached its height with two sensational criminal trials, during which evidence implicated some of the most prominent men in America, including two presidents, several current and former members of Congress, a handful of cabinet members, and small armies of federal prosecutors and defense attorneys. The scandal also involved an assassination, the bribing of juries, the possible theft-by government attorneys, no less - of important documents, and witnesses fleeing to other countries to avoid subpoenas. Based on a wide variety of primary and secondary source materials, including trial transcripts, congressional testimony, and private correspondence, Shawn Peters's "When Bad Men Combine" provides a first-ever glimpse into a uniquely tumultuous period in American political history. Comprehensively tracking the trajectory of the Star Route scandal, he reveals how modern politics emerged, in fits and starts, from the enormous upheaval wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. One crucial change came occurred in government itself. A dizzying and seemingly nonstop succession of scandals plagued American politics in the 1870s. The "era of good stealings," as one historian has dubbed it, featured numerous infamous examples of federal officials abusing their positions to enrich themselves and their allies. The Star Route case was, in some respects, the final straw for those who believed that the time had come for a system grounded in avarice and political patronage to be replaced by one based on merit, competence, and a commitment to the core principles of good government. As Peters shows, it was no coincidence that President Arthur signed the landmark Pendleton Civil Service Act into law in the middle of the second Star Route trial"--

"Louisiana Paperback Edition, 1995, reissued 2023"--Title page verso.

When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further--to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons--Englishmen of German descent--some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament--differences that made civil war inevitable.

"'Doctors at War: Their Clandestine Battle against the Nazi Occupation of France,' tells the stories of a handful of French physicians who did all they could to impede the German war effort. Determined to defeat the Nazi program, one group of Paris doctors founded a medical Resistance network to help treat injured guerrillas and keep young men from being sent to forced labor in Germany. Another group of doctors organized an intelligence and sabotage network that grew to become one of the largest in the Resistance-even after the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned its leaders. Once in the camps, the doctors continued to work against the Nazis by helping keep their fellow prisoners alive. Other doctors joined the rural guerrilla camps to treat the young men fighting to prevent German reinforcements from reaching Normandy after the D-Day landing. Their stories, told by Ellen Hampton for the first time, add an important dimension to the history of occupied France. Throughout the story, there are American threads, from airmen who parachuted in and needed medical treatment and a guide to escape to American doctors working in Paris or internment camps to the US Army-led liberation of France. Memoirs and archival documents provide the backbone of 'Doctors at War,' while contemporary accounts and records of those working with the Nazis and the Vichy government describe the opposition they faced. Well-connected pediatrician Robert Debrâe, for example, could not practice medicine because of his Jewish heritage. Rather than leave the country, as many did, he pulled strings to get an exemption to continue working. Debrâe refused to wear the yellow star of racial identification, but the authorities decided to let it go because of his stature. His rebellion worked until the Gestapo came looking for him, and he had to flee. However, after a year in hiding, he returned to run the medical services during the chaotic liberation of Paris. Written for both historians and general readers of World War II history, 'Doctors at War' is a dramatic, character-driven account of the physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil. It is a window into life under a fascist regime and the story of how doctors negotiated the terrifying moral labyrinth that was the Nazi Occupation of France"

"Draining New Orleans is the first full-length book entirely devoted to one of the world's most challenging drainage problems: the reclamation and drainage of a fluvial delta for the development of the City of New Orleans. Renowned Crescent City geographer and historian Richard Campanella introduces readers to the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater New Orleans. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he recovers the herculean effort to 'reclaim' the city's swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for urbanization. This is not a story about mud; rather, it is a history of people, power, and the making of place. Campanella emphasizes the role of empowered, colorful individuals who spearheaded efforts to separate water from dirt and create value in the process not only for the community, but also for themselves. Campanella opens with a festive scene on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, in which an elaborate parade for 'the Drainage King'--a local hero by the serendipitous name of George Hero--brought an elite entourage to the edge of the Barataria swamp to witness the activation of gigantic pumps, via a telephonic connection to President Woodrow Wilson in the White House. What transpired in the years and decades ahead can only be understood by going back two centuries-to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta and continuing through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times. The consequences of the dewatering of New Orleans are both triumphant and tragic. The city's engineering prowess made it a world leader in drainage technology, yet also a vulnerable victim of its own success. And by no means is the story over, for amid the uncertainty wrought by soil subsidence, coastal erosion, and climate change, the next generation of drainage experts are striving to improve on the past by doing something utterly inconceivable to their predecessors: rewatering New Orleans"--