Books published by Louisiana State University Press

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South.

This is an altogether engaging collection of ruminations on early New Orleans writers - George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate Chopin - as well as three prolific twentieth-century authors who called the Crescent City "home" at various times: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy.

"August First Day" became the most important annual celebration of emancipation among people of African descent in the northern US, the British Caribbean, Canada West, and the UK and played a critical role in popular mobilization against American slavery. J.R. Kerr-Ritchie provides the first detailed analysis of this important commemoration.

This valuable study of Flannery O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader.

Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Keeping the Beat on the Street celebrates the renewed passion and pageantry among black brass bands in New Orleans. Mick Burns introduces the people who play the music and shares their insights, showing why New Orleans is the place where jazz continues to grow.

Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. We have long known that travel broadens; in these poems, it also deepens and makes wiser.

Born into a wealthy Mississippi plantation family in 1843, David Eldred Holt joined Company K of the 16th Mississippi Regiment in 1861 and served in the Eastern theatre throughout the Civil War. This memoir recounts the idyllic life of an affluent southern boy before the war and the exhilarating, sometimes humorous, experiences of a common soldier.

The first published personal narrative by a regimental commander of free black troops, Thank God My Regiment an African One offers a unique glimpse into the daily lives of white leaders of the earliest black soldiers. It is a significant contribution to the ongoing documentation of the experience of black troops in the Civil War.

Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well, however, Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit.

Three veteran newspapermen examine the history and character of one of America's most remarkable states. This comprehensive, entertaining work will inform natives of their rich heritage and familiarize others with the many sources of Louisiana's special charm.

Presents Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change - from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business centre to its present-day languishing.

In 1880, George Washington Cable was commissioned to write a "historical sketch" of pre-Civil War New Orleans for a special section of the Tenth U.S. Census. With The New Orleans of George Washington Cable, Lawrence Powell presents this rare text in its entirety for the first time, including Cable's copious footnotes.

For nearly five decades, award-winning poet Brendan Galvin has written about the birds of the tidal flats, woods, and marshes around his Cape Cod home and on islands in the North Atlantic. He knows their field marks, habits, and songs, and his work demonstrates an obvious fascination with them. Whirl Is King gathers forty-three of his bird poems about herons, owls, shorebirds, warblers, raptors, wrens, and other exotic visitors blown in by wind and storm.Seen from various angles and stratagems, Galvin's migrants and locals are always in motion, acting and acted upon, sometimes predatory, sometimes possessing mythic qualities. In tones ranging from the elegiac to the hilarious, these poems inhabit the overlapping borders of human and avian life: "not to salute such / charity of song / though it be plain as / thumbsqueaks on clear windowpanes, / not to say their names, / and the shadow of death passes / across our tongues." Whirl Is King features Galvin's hallmark descriptive powers and verbal music on full display and demonstrates his talent as a contemporary poet.

Irish poet Greg Delanty presents a series of poems that explore the birth of a child. These poems log the days before and after a child is born, detailing the wonder and trepidation of parents, the growth of the child, and speculation on the soul and spirit. Written from the vantage point of a father--his hopes, fears, awe, and perplexity--these poems register the seen and unseen interconnections of place, people, the natural world, and the continuity of the past with the present and the future.

Colorfully known as the "Greyhound Division" for its lean and speedy marches across thousands of miles in three states, Major General John G. Walker's infantry division in the Confederate army was the largest body of Texans -- about 12,000 men at its formation -- to serve in the American Civil War. From its creation in 1862 until its disbandment at the war's end, Walker's unit remained, uniquely for either side in the conflict, a stable group of soldiers from a single state. Richard Lowe's compelling saga shows how this collection of farm boys, store clerks, carpenters, and lawyers became the trans-Mississippi's most potent Confederate fighting unit, from the vain attack at Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, in 1863 during Grant's Vicksburg Campaign to stellar performances at the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins' Ferry that helped repel Nathaniel P. Banks's Red River Campaign of 1864. Lowe's skillful blending of narrative drive and demographic profiling represents an innovative history of the period that is sure to set a new benchmark.

Scholars of reconstruction have generally described Republican Party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the racial agenda evoked unified black support. This study aims to show that that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intaracial dynamic.

Offers the first complete history of the interaction among whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in the Indian and Oklahoma Territories from the end of the Civil War until Oklahoma statehood, addressing questions about the nature of American race relations, the answers to which far transcend the territorial boundaries of the region.

Originally published in 1990, award-winning historian Joseph Glatthaar recreates the events that gave the United States Colored Troops and their 7,000 white officers justifiable pride in their contributions to the Union victory and hope of equality in the years to come.

Examines the paradox that communities famous for their cohesiveness and moral stability were in fact oppressive along race and class lines. The author uses readings from "Georgia Scenes", "Swallow Barn", "In Ole Virginia", "Lanterns on the Levee" and "Light in August" to illustrate this point.

This reprint edition of Napier Bartlett's 1875 memoir again makes available a valuable resource on Louisiana troops' participation in the Civil War. Bartlett served throughout the war in Louisiana's elite Washington Artillery and fought in many battles in Virginia and the East.

First published in 1865, Belle Boyd's memoir of her experiences as a Confederate spy has stood the test of time and interest. In this new edition, Kennedy-Nolle and Faust consider the domestic side of the Civil War and also assess the value of Boyd's memoir for social and literary historians.

Deeply rooted in personal and regional history, David Middleton's The Fiddler of Driskill Hill celebrates a particular place and the universal human experience. While evoking distinctive Louisiana landscapes, both north and south, these poems address the great philosophical and theological questions of the ages.

First published in 1978, Claude Oubre's Forty Acres and a Mule has since become a definitive study in the history of American Reconstruction. Oubre recounts the struggle of black families to acquire land and how the US government agency Freedmen's Bureau both served and obstructed them.

From George Ella Lyon comes a dynamic and humorous collection examining the transformations of one woman's life as she tries on, takes on, and peels off identities learned from family stories, gender, fairy tales, and myths.

A powerful confluence of youthful energies and entrenched codes of honour enlivens Robert Pace's look at the world of male student college life in the antebellum South. Through extensive research, Pace creates a vivid portrait of adolescent rebelliousness struggling with the ethic to cultivate a public face of industry, respect, and honesty.

A bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without.

A riveting war epic of local scale and human dimensions. Taking its title from the cry raised in Williamsburg as the Federal army approached in 1862, Carol Dubbs's narrative sweeps us into the lives of residents of this small historic city from the secession of Virginia in 1861 to Lee's surrender four years later.

For two weeks every year, literary figures from across America gather in Sewanee, Tennessee, to lead the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a series of workshops and colloquia aimed at cultivating the craft of writing. Gleaned from the first ten conferences, this collection offers a range of perspectives on writing as practiced by various writers.