Books published by Louisiana State University Press

The wife of South Carolina secessionist governor Francis W. Pickens, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, was one of the most famous women in the South. Rumour had it that she published a novel, "The Free Flag of Cuba" under a pseudonym. This text resurrects Holcombe's lost work.

Joel Rosenthal's survey of five noteworthy self-proclaimed political realists explores the realists' overarching commitment to transforming traditional power politics into a form of "responsible power" commensurate with American values.

At a time when sectional conflicts were dividing the nation, the five best-selling southern domestic novelists vigorously came to the defense of their native region. In this volume, Elizabeth Moss locates these novelists within the broader context of antebellum social and political culture.

Magi and Walser bring together twenty-five accounts of Thomas Wolfe talking to the press--ranging from the first interview he gave, a conversation with a student journalist for New York University's "Daily News", to the last, an interview with the Portland "Sunday Oregonian" in July, 1938, only a few months before his death.

Representing years of extensive research, this authoritative and comprehensive guide to the records generated in the Louisiana Territory during the French and Spanish colonial periods is a major reference work.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity.

Originally published in French in 1911 and translated into English in 1973, Our People and Our History records the lives of fifty prominent Creoles who lived in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century.

The final volume of Thomas Lawrence Connelly's definitive history of one of the Confederacy's two major military forces, Connelly analyses the factors underlying the army's failure during the last two years of the Civil War.

The third Tula Springs novel, Miss Undine's Living Room is not only a masterful comedy, exuberant and irreverent, but also a deeply felt examination of the education of the mind and the spirit.

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts.

My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune, first published in Belgium in 1872, is Belgian scientist Jean-Charles Houzeau's memoir of the four years he spent as both observer and participant in the drama of American Reconstruction.

Robert Kirschten maintains that most formal analyses of Jams Dickey's poetry have been unsatisfactory or at best only partially complete. In James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth, Kirschten provides a fuller understanding of Dickey's lyric vision by employing what Ronald Crane calls "multiple working hypotheses".

When Thea Tamborella returns to New Orleans after a ten-year absence, she finds a city gripped by fear. The city's haves and have-nots glare at each other across a yawning racial divide as fear turns to hate and an us-against-them mentality.

With a penetrating eye, Betty Adcock writes poems that range from elegy to dark humour as they confront both loss and possibility. Intervale, selections from her first four books plus a new collection, traces the continuity of her vision and shows that lyric intensity can bring light to even the most obdurate darkness.

Some historians extol Major General Benjamin Butler as a great humanitarian, whereas others vilify him as a brazen opportunist. In this examination of Butler's administration of New Orleans during the Civil War, historian Chester G. Hearn reveals that both assessments are correct.

For more than twenty years Michael Holt has been considered one of the leading specialists in the political history of the United States. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln is a collection of some of his more important shorter studies on the politics of nineteenth-century America.

Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton's Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines is a collection of interviews conducted on the porch of Gaines's home in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Fascinating in its depiction of an intelligent young man's coming of age in the days of the Land Rush and the closing of the frontier, My Life and an Era is equally important for its reporting of the triracial culture of early Oklahoma.

"It is ... refreshing to find a work that illuminates the complete war years of this major southern city.... Confederate Mobile will prove an invaluable guide to anyone wishing to understand wartime Mobile and the military maneuvers involved in defending the important southern port."- Florida Historical Quarterly

Focuses on the decade of the 1840s, when the impact of coffee and export agriculture began to revolutionize Costa Rican society. Lowell Gudmundson focuses on the nature of the society prior to the coffee boom, but he also makes observations on the entire sweep of Costa Rican history.

Al Rose has known virtually every noteworthy jazz musician of this century. In I Remember Jazz, Rose draws on his unparallelled experience to recall, through brief but poignant vignettes, the greats and the near-greats of jazz.

William Gilmore Simms was the preeminent southern man of letters in the antebellum period, a prolific, talented writer in many genres and an eloquent intellectual spokesman of his region. Many Ann Wimsatt provides the first significant full-length evaluation of Simms's achievement in his long fiction, selected poetry, essays, and short fiction.

In Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., examines the emergence of the planter-aristocrat over the yeoman as the dominant cultural icon in the newly settled states of the Old Southwest -- Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas -- during the first half of the nineteenth century. He related this region's shift in cultural ideals, as reflected in its literature, both to the coming of the Civil War and the failure of the postbellum South to reintegrate itself fully into the nation.In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson's stalwart yeoman farmer was the mythic figure that gave the most dynamic expression to and most compelling justification for expansion to the west. This potent symbol of rural democracy was enthusiastically embraced by settlers in both midwestern and southern territories. By 1830, however, residents of the new southern states had initiated a profound imaginative movement away from the frontier myths that had linked them with midwesterners. Faced with increasingly hostile attacks on slavery and the plantation system, southerners from Virginia to Louisiana united in defense of the plantation South. Watson shows how writers of the Old Southwest reflected this cultural shift in their tendency to idealize the planter and to subvert, subordinate, or ignore the yeoman. Joining cultural and intellectual forces with the more established plantation societies of the Eastern Seaboard, these writers turned toward the Cavalier -- the noble, cultured planter of aristocratic blood and manners who, like a father, presided with wisdom and love over a large plantation -- as the primary representative of the southern way of life.Watson builds his argument by analyzing many different kinds of writing. Choosing texts that shed light on the newly evolving culture of the Old Southwest, Watson discusses the novelists William Garrott Brown, James Lane Allen, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Augusta Jane Evans, historian Charles Gayarre, humorists Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, New South propagandist Henry Grady, novelist and story writer George Washington Cable, and poets Joseph Brennan and Sidney Lanier.The Cavalier ideal, Watson explains, unified the states of the Confederacy and served as a kind if icon to be carried into battle. After the war the figure was resurrected by southern writers and made an integral part of the region's Lost Cause myth, which northerners helped perpetuate. The Cavalier figure has continued to lead a vigorous life into the present century, as attested by novels such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, and even William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!Yeoman Versus Cavalier is a solid and entertainingly written analysis of how the Cavalier, as the South's unifying mythical figure, helped shape southern history and the creation of the legend of the Old South following the Civil War. It contributes greatly to our understanding of the antebellum South and demonstrates how studying a work of literature can lead to a fuller comprehension of the culture that produced it.

What does it mean to be a Southern writer in the 1970s? What is the nature of today's South and what prospects does it offer a writer? These twelve interviews with writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction elicit some thoughtful and revealing answers.

This is an important, perceptive study of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career and an astute critical analysis of the reporting practices of the news media in the modern era.

Like many other northern clergymen after the Civil War, A.D. Mayo became interested in the role that education could play in rebuilding southern society. In Southern Women, Mayo set forth at length the ideas that southern white women were the ideal ones to transmit learning to the young blacks.

Daniel Russell is a good example of what Carl Degler has termed "the other South". The son of an aristocratic North Carolina family of staunch Whig-Unionists, he entered politics when the Republican party first appeared in the state after the Civil War. For more than forty years he fought the solid South mentality of the Bourbon Democrats.

What contributed to Grace King's critical acclaim, and her continued importance across time, was the panoramic view of social and historical New Orleans that she captured in her writing. She was, scholar Robert Bush argues, one of the most talented and perceptive citizens of New Orleans during the post- Civil War period.

With this definitive study of Federalism in the Jeffersonian South, James H. Broussard makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge of the early political development of the United States and closes the gap in our knowledge of the Federalist party south of the Potomac.In a work grounded in fresh research from original sources, Broussard examines all aspects of Federalism in the states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. In his broad coverage he shows how the particular political system of each states affected party development, how the Federalists used party organization and newspapers to increase their appeal, and how individual Federalists faced such issues as slavery, judicial reform, and government aid to education and economic development.Using previously unavailable data, The Southern Federalists presents a thorough analysis of the historical, demographic, and economic voter patterns of our first party system. Although national origin, religion, wealth, and support for the Constitution were the bases of Federalism in other areas, the only factor common to southern Federalists was their deep fear of France. When this fear was put tor est by Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, there was no further need for the Federalists to remain a cohesive party.

Deals with people who have been pushed out into the darkness. They are the children of darkness and some of them do dark deeds. But Thorup has said that if she had to choose an epigraph for the novel, it would be a line from Hugo: "Not those who do dark deeds, but those who create the darkness are the truly guilty ones."