Books published by Louisiana State University Press

In her moving and deeply personal memoir, Ella Schneider Hilton chronicles her remarkable childhood - one that took her from the purges of Stalinist Russia to the refugee camps of Nazi and postwar Germany to the cotton fields of Jim Crow Mississippi before granting her access to the American dream.

Grounded in technical mastery, the poems in Out of Speech address issues both universal and timely. In this series of ekphrastic works, Adam Vines explores themes as varied as exile, family, disease, desire, and isolation through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first century painters.

Ten scholars of nineteenth-century America address the epochal impact of the Civil War by examining the conflict in terms of three Americas - antebellum, wartime, and postbellum nations. Moreover, they recognize the role in this transformative era of three groups of Americans - white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans.

In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence.

Joyce Carol Oates is America's most extraordinary and prolific woman of letters. Gavin Cologne-Brookes illuminates the vision of Oates, finding evidence in her novels of an evolving consciousness that forgoes abstract introspection in favour of a more practical approach to art as a tool for understanding both personal and social challenges.

Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems.

While most historians agree that Robert E. Lee's loyalty to Virginia was the key factor in his decision to join the Confederate cause, Richard B. McCaslin further demonstrates that Lee's true call to action was the legacy of the American Revolution viewed through his reverence for George Washington.

Provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honour, master-slave relationships, and the justii cation of slavery in the antebellum South.

In his second collection of poems, Stephen Cushman explores, appraises, and celebrates many different forms of connections - domestic, social, historical, and religious. With an easygoing voice, an engaging humor, and a sure understanding of his craft, he illustrates the rewards of a sensitive regard for the junctions in everyday life and language.

Discusses the nature and effectiveness of the Confederacy's high command, the men who composed it, the decisions they made, and the influences that shaped their policies. Frank Vandiver presents not only a concise description of the machinery of the Confederate high command but also sharp analyses of the figures who dominated the system.

A central political figure in the first post-Revolutionary generation, Felix Grundy epitomized the "American democrat". In Democracy's Lawyer, the first comprehensive biography of Grundy since 1940, J. Roderick Heller reveals how Grundy's life typifies the archetypal, post-founding fathers generation that forged America's culture and institutions.

Offers a fresh, multifaceted interpretation of the quintessential sectional conflict in pre-Civil War Kansas. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel explores the crucial roles Native Americans, African Americans, and white women played in the literal and rhetorical battle between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the region.

Navigating the dangerous currents of family and race, Kathryn Stripling Byer's sixth poetry collection confronts the legacy of southern memory, where too often "it's safer to stay blind." Ultimately, Descent creates a fragile reconciliation between past and present, calling over and over again to celebrate being Here. Where I am.

Most written accounts of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, during the Civil War era begin and end with John Brown's raid in 1859 and his subsequent hanging. In Six Years of Hell, Chester Hearn recounts the harrowing story of Harpers Ferry's tumultuous war years - during which it changed hands more often than any town but Winchester, Virginia.

Offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship.

Until now, Civil War scholars considered Bright and the Union incursion that culminated in his gruesome death as only a historical footnote. In Executing Daniel Bright, Barton Myers uses these events as a window into the wider experience of local guerrilla conflict in North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp region.

By the time of the Civil War, the railroads had advanced to allow the movement of large numbers of troops even though railways had not yet matured into a truly integrated transportation system. As John Clark explains, the skill with which Union and Confederate war leaders utilized the rail system was an essential ingredient for ultimate victory.

In what may be the most impressive research to date of state supreme court records, this study analyses the evolution of Louisiana's slave laws from the territorial period to the Civil War. Schafer presents concise case histories, stories that are fascinating and at times heartbreaking in the particulars they reveal about slaves' existence.

General John Bell Hood's plan to revive the Confederacy's chances of victory in the US Civil War were crushed during the battle of Nashville, according to Stanley Horn. In this absorbing account of the battle, first published in 1956, Horn devotes much attention to a detailed summary of the two-day struggle.

Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none.

The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the lives, places, and stories of women in the Iberian Atlantic between 1500 and 1800. Distinguished contributors such as Ida Altman, Matt D. Childs, and Allyson M. Poska utilize the complexities of gender to understand issues of race, class, family, health, and religious practices in the Atlantic basin. Unlike previous scholarship, which has focused primarily on upper-class and noble women, this book examines the lives of those on the periphery, including free and enslaved Africans, colonized indigenous mothers, and poor Spanish women.Chapters range broadly across time periods and regions of the Atlantic world. The authors explore the lives of Caribbean women in the earliest era of Spanish colonization and gender norms in Spain and its far-flung colonies. They extend the boundaries of the traditional Atlantic by analyzing healing knowledge of indigenous women in Portuguese Goa and kinship bonds among women in Spanish East Texas. Together, these innovative essays rechart the Iberian Atlantic while revealing the widespread impact of women's activities on the emergence of the Iberian Atlantic world.

Challenges the idea that commercial and industrial interests did little to alter the planter-dominated political economy of the Old South. By analyzing the interplay of planters, merchants, and manufacturers, Tom Downey characterizes the South as a sphere of contending types of capitalists.

Spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages - accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch.

Sometimes called the "wharf rats from New Orleans" and the "lowest scrapings of the Mississippi," Lee's Tigers were the approximately twelve thousand Louisiana infantrymen who served in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Terry Jones offers a colourful, highly readable account of this notorious group of soldiers.

From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1864, James Henry Hammond witnessed the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom of the Old South. A long-awaited biography, Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South reveals the South Carolina planter who was at once characteristic of his age and unique among men of his time.

In one volume, these essentially unabridged selections from the works of the proslavery apologists are now conveniently accessible to scholars and students of the antebellum South. The Ideology of Slavery includes excerpts by Thomas R. Dew, founder of a new phase of proslavery militancy; William Harper and James Henry Hammond, representatives of the proslavery mainstream; Thornton Stringfellow, the most prominent biblical defender of the peculiar institution; Henry Hughes and Josiah Nott, who brought would-be scientism to the argument; and George Fitzhugh, the most extreme of proslavery writers.The works in this collection portray the development, mature essence, and ultimate fragmentation of the proslavery argument during the era of its greatest importance in the American South. Drew Faust provides a short introduction to each selection, giving information about the author and an account of the origin and publication of the document itself.Faust's introduction to the anthology traces the early historical treatment of proslavery thought and examines the recent resurgence of interest in the ideology of the Old South as a crucial component of powerful relations within that society. She notes the intensification of the proslavery argument between 1830 and 1860, when southern proslavery thought became more systematic and self-conscious, taking on the characteristics of a formal ideology with its resulting social movement. From this intensification came the pragmatic tone and inductive mode that the editor sees as a characteristic of southern proslavery writings from the 1830s onward. The selections, introductory comments, and bibliography of secondary works on the proslavery argument will be of value to readers interested in the history of slavery and of nineteenth-centruy American thought.

Rising from humble origins in the middle Georgia cotton belt, Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883) became one of the South's leading politicians and lawyers. Thomas Schott's scholarly biography analyses the interplay between the public and private Stephens and between state and national politics during his contradictory career.