Books published by Louisiana State University Press

A poetic study of the eternal, T.R. Hummer's new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy, Ephemeron and Skandalon, offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond.

Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organisation, the aspect that has dominated historical debates, and slavery as a set of property rights.

Explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. These two sites mirror the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through Charleston and Savannah.

Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body.

Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret Storey's welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union.

John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess visionary thinker Oswald Spengler and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilisation.

Too often the war waged west of the Mississippi River has been given short shrift by historians, who have tended to focus their attention on the great battles east of the river. This book looks in detail at the military operations that occurred in Louisiana, most of them minor skirmishes, but some of them battles and campaigns of major importance.

In this sensitive intellectual biography David Blight undertakes the first systematic analysis of the impact of the Civil War on Frederick Douglass' life and thought, offering new insights into the meaning of the war in American history and in the Afro-American experience.

Beginning and ending in Clarence Major's atelier, My Studio demonstrates how art can influence our perception of the world, prompting "all the parts [to] coalesce into a cohesive whole." With precise and engaging imagery, Major contemplates the spaces we occupy and the "beauty in everyday things" from the familiarity of his studio.

In this transformative new collection, Margaret Gibson moves inward, taking surprising, mercurial turns of the imagination, guided by an original and probative intelligence. With a clear eye and an open heart, Gibson writes, "How stark it is to be alive"- and also how glorious, how curious, how intimate.

Researching the story of elite southern white women's successful quest for a measure of independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow, this study shows how they rethought and rebuilt themselves during a brief but important period of relative freedom.

In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans.

Explores how leaders at five of the American south's most prestigious private universities - Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt - sought to strengthen their national position and reputation while simultaneously answering the increasing pressure to end segregation after World War II.

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex - and far more interesting - than his legend.

Tells the story of the Big Easy in the twentieth century. In this urban biography, J. Mark Souther explores the Crescent City's architecture, music, food and alcohol, folklore and spiritualism, Mardi Gras festivities, and illicit sex commerce in revealing how New Orleans became a city that parades itself to visitors and residents alike.

Provides a compelling comparison of seemingly disparate groups and illuminates the contours of nationalism during Reconstruction. By joining the Fenians with freedpeople and southern whites, Mitchell Snay seeks to assert their central relevance to the dynamics of nationalism during Reconstruction.

Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677) influenced colonial Virginia more than any other man of his era, diversifying Virginia's trade with international markets, serving as a model for the planter aristocracy, and helping to establish American self-rule. In this biography, Warren Billings offers the first full-scale treatment of Berkeley's life.

By examining how ordinary Virginia citizens grappled with the vexing problem of slavery in a society dedicated to universal liberty, Eva Sheppard Wolf broadens our understanding of such concepts as freedom, slavery, emancipation, and race in the early years of the American republic.

Inspired by a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn" - which depicts a former artist's model in her declining years, still full of life and facing death with flair and wit - Kathryn Byer finds a voice to contemplate the enigmatic but inevitable process of growing old.

Emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byer's fascination with female ballad singers in southern Appalachia, whose voices haunt the mountains still, and from the image of a black net or shawl being dragged over the ground, plumbing the depths, collecting bits and fragments of a woman's life.

The story of General Price - as this account by Albert Castle shows - is the story, in large part, of the Confederacy's struggle in the West. The author draws a fascinating portrait of Price the man - vain, courageous, addicted to secrecy - and produces insightful interpretations and much pertinent information about the Civil War in the West.

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilises Mrs. Chesnut's autobiographical writings, her papers, and those of her family, as well as published sources.

In this illuminating work, Robert B. Holtman emphasizes Napoleon's role as a revolutionary innovator whose influence touched nearly every aspect of European political and social life and has extended even to our own times.

Examines case histories from the First District Court of New Orleans and tells the engrossing story of prostitution in the city prior to the Civil War. Relying on previously unexamined court records and newspaper articles, Schafer ably details the brutal and often harrowing lives of the women and young girls who engaged in prostitution.

Explores what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, Michael Chitwood meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand.

Always spirited and elegant, by turns witty and meditative, Catharine Savage Brosman's Under the Pergola contemplates Louisiana, past and present, before traveling a broader path that crosses Colorado landscapes and the island of Sicily.In her eighth collection of poems, Brosman evokes the Pelican State's trees, birds, rivers, swamps, bayous, New Orleans scenes, historic houses, and colorful characters. She also recounts, in free verse, formal verse, and one prose poem, the "misdeeds of Katrina" as she and others experienced them.Other poems range widely, from reflections on writers Samuel Johnson, Paul Claudel, André Malraux, and James Dickey to quiet meditations on the American West, Odysseus, fruits and vegetables, and the recent "light years" of the poet's life -- which she characterizes as "silken... slipping smoothly off" like a gown.

Set against a backdrop of a nation exhausted by war, in a decadent city that for years has been denied its butter, sugar, and Mardi Gras, My Bright Midnight is a novel about the complications of loyalties to country, to friends, and to those we love.