Books published by Louisiana State University Press

In this collection, Civil War historian Gary Gallagher examines Robert E. Lee, his principal subordinates, the treatment they have received in the literature on Confederate military history, and the continuing influence of Lost Cause arguments in the late-twentieth-century United States.

In this provocative analysis of the postbellum southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South's peculiar labour market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained backward for so long. After the Civil War, Wright explains, the South continued to be a low-wage regional market embedded in a high-wage national economy.

From the first passage in William C. Davis' book about "the twilight of America's innocence" to the last, the reader is carried through what many in the 1860s believed would be the only major conflict between North and South.

After the US Civil War, Native Guard veterans took up the struggle for civil rights - in particular, voting rights - for Louisiana's black population. The Louisiana Native Guards is the first account to consider that struggle, placing the Native Guards' military service in the broader context of the civil rights movement.

On April 22, 1896, Martin Begnaud was brutally murdered in his general store in Scott Station, Louisiana. By intertwining a suspenseful account of this heinous crime with an exploration of the citizens it affected, No Spark of Malice provides insight into a fascinating people, place, and era.

Serves as a companion guide for readers who enjoy Walker Percy's novels but may be less familiar with the works of Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, and Dante. In addition to clarifying Percy's philosophies, Wilson highlights allusions to other writers within his narratives and addresses historical and political contexts.

With occupation, the home front and the battlefield merged to create an unanticipated second front where civilians - mainly women - resisted what they perceived as unjust domination. In this volume, historians consider how women's reactions to occupation affected both the strategies of military leaders and ultimately the outcome of the Civil War.

In February 1972, President Nixon arrived in Beijing for what Chairman Mao called the "week that changed the world." Using declassified sources from American, Chinese, European, and Soviet archives, Chris Tudda reveals how the relationship forged by the Nixon administration and the Chinese government that altered the trajectory of the Cold War.

An unprecedented window into the life of a Virginia bondsman, John Washington's Civil War communicates with real urgency what it meant to be a slave during a period of extreme crisis that sounded the notes of freedom for some and the end of a way of life for others.

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city's sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era. Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans's lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

Examines emancipation and the difficult transition from slavery to free labour in one enclave of the South - the cane sugar region of southern Louisiana. John Rodrigue demonstrates that the special geographical and environmental requirements of sugar production in Louisiana shaped new labour arrangements.

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft's break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. No account conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple's own version, published in 1860.

Explores the childbearing and -rearing responsibilities that consumed, often literally, the lives of women in the Old South. Sally McMillen explores the social, political, and medical influences of the time, and examines how a woman's maternal role ensured her value within the family and the greater society.

Provides the first comprehensive directory of the over 1,500 African Americans who held political office in the South during the Reconstruction era. The book presents an impressive amount of information about the antebellum status, occupations, property ownership, and military service of these officials.

An encyclopedia of the forms used by poets throughout the history of English, from blank verse to hymnal measure, from englyn penfyr to the double dactyl, from the clerihew to the sonnet. Each form is introduced with a brief discussion of its origin, which is followed by a graphic presentation of its scansion, metrics, and rhyme scheme.

A valuable and entertaining document that should find a place among the enduring books on the Civil War.

In the years during and after World War I the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey led what has been called the largest international mass movement of black people in the twentieth century. He and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), built a steamship line, sponsored expeditions to Liberia, staged annual international conventions, inspired many black business enterprises, endorsed black political candidates, and fostered the study of black history and culture.Judith Stein has not written a conventional biography, though Garvey is the central character. The book is more a study of Garvey's ideology and appeal and of the UNIA and the social basis of its support. Stein examines Garvey's movement in light of the dialectic of race and class that shaped it. Whereas other historians have depicted Garveyism variously as a back-to-Africa, civil rights, or Black Power movement, Stein places Garvey and the UNIA carefully in the context of the international black politics and economics of the period. She analyzes the ways in which the UNIA was a response to the social and political upheaval of world War I and its aftermath. Garvey and other UNIA leaders were part of an international elite of blacks who applauded the triumph of capitalism, though they excoriated the new order's racial discrimination, which denied people like themselves places of prestige in it. Their response to exclusion from the mainstream Western economic world was to construct black institutions modeled on those of white elites. The Black Star Line, the UNIA's steamship company, was just such a venture, and though Garvey's goal of incorporating the black working class into his movement seemed promising briefly after World War I, it ultimately failed. The promise of Garveyism, supported by ideologies generated by the new social movements of the 1920s, was undercut by UNIA leaders' doomed effort to adapt a bourgeois mode of operation to a mass movement. Garveyism was fatally flawed by the ultimate disjunction of its elite methods and mass base. In addition to her reevaluation of standard views of Garvey and Garveyism, Stein sheds new light on her subject with her use of new sources. Among the most interesting of these are her interviews with surviving Garveyites and reports on Garvey by agent of the federal government's intelligence organizations.Judith Stein is the first historian both to take Garveyism seriously and to treat it in its own right as a product of its own time. The resulting study should be of great interest to anyone interested in Garvey, his historical period, or the ways in which his work and ideology still influence us today.

Located just north of Baton Rouge, Port Hudson, Louisiana, was the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River and the site of the longest genuine siege in American military history. This book offers a compelling account of the Confederate occupation of Port Hudson in August, 1862, and the Union's efforts to capture the stronghold.

This work returns the South's civil rights revolution of 1954-1965 to its historical context. It anchors the racial crises within other nonracial events of the postwar decade, and pursues its transforming and often paradoxical consequences through the quiet death of Jim Crow in the 1970s.

The contributions of more than 600 Catholic nuns to the care of Confederate and Union sick and wounded made a critical impact upon 19th-century America. This text covers this era in detail, describing the suspicion and prejudice, suffering and self-sacrifice, ingenuity, benificence, and gratitude.

Presents an iconoclastic interpretation of the political, military, and ethnic complexities of Andrew Jackson's involvement in the Creek War of 1813-1814 and the First Seminole War in 1818. Their exciting narrative shows how the general's unpredictable behaviour brought the US to the brink of an international crisis.

Taije Silverman's debut collection chronicles her family's devotion and dissolution through the death of her mother. Ranging in style from measured narratives to fragmented lyrics that convey the ambiguity of loss, these poems both arc into the past and question the possibility of the future.

The first-ever murder in the Paris Metro dominated the headlines for weeks during the summer of 1937, as the shocking truth about the victim was slowly revealed. Gayle Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite unravel a complicated and mysterious life, assessing the victim's complex identity within the larger political context of the time.

No other Reconstruction state government was as chaotic or violent as Louisiana's, located in New Orleans, the largest southern city at the time. James Hogue explains the unique confluence of demographics, geography, and wartime events that made New Orleans an epicenter in the upheaval of Reconstruction politics.

In this groundbreaking work, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies Louisiana's creole slave community during the eighteenth century, focusing on the slaves' African origins, the evolution of their own language and culture, and the role they played in the formation of the broader society, economy, and culture of the region.

These 93 poems by Robert Morgan span 35 years.

Blending official documents and city council minutes with personal diaries and newspaper accounts, Emory Thomas vividly recounts the military, political, social, and economic experiences of the Confederate capital, providing a compelling drama of home-front war that, in Richmond's case, rivaled the spectacular events on the battlefield.