Books published by Louisiana State University Press

Western Rivermen, the first documented sociocultural history of its subject, is a fascinating book. Michael Allen explores the rigorous lives of professional boatmen who plied non-steam vessels--flatboats, keelboats, and rafts--on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers from 1763-1861. Allen first considers the mythical "half horse, half alligator" boatmen who were an integral part of the folklore of the time. Americans of the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War period perceived the rivermen as hard-drinking, straight-shooting adventurers on the frontier. Their notions were reinforced by romanticized portrayals of the boatmen in songs, paintings, newspaper humor, and literature. Allen contends that these mythical depictions of the boatmen were a reflection of the yearnings of an industrializing people for what they thought to be a simpler time. Allen demonstrates, however, that the actual lives of the rivermen little resembled their portrayals in popular culture. Drawing on more than eighty firsthand accounts--ranging from a short letter to a four-volume memoir--he provides a rounded view of the boatmen that reveals the lonely, dangerous nature of their profession. He also discusses the social and economic aspects of their lives, such as their cargoes, the river towns they visited, and the impact on their lives of the steamboat and advancing civilization. Allen's comprehensive, highly informative study sheds new light on a group of men who played an important role in the development of the trans-Appalachian West and the ways in which their lives were transformed into one of the enduring themes of American folk culture.

In Fathers of International Thought, renowned foreign affairs scholar Kenneth W. Thompson returns to the writings of sixteen thinkers in order better to understand the issues and problems that recurrently beset global politics.

John Brown Gordon's career of prominent public service spanned four of America's most turbulent decades. Utilizing newspapers, scattered manuscript collections, and official records, Ralph Eckert presents a critical biography of Gordon that analyses all areas of his career.

Traces the political dimension of Lincoln's antislavery stance as it evolved from the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to his election as president in 1860. Robert Johannsen sees Lincoln as an astute and ambitious politician whose statements where shaped and directed by the time's ever-changing political exigencies and considerations.

In The Vigil, Margaret Gibson adroitly interweaves the voices of four women, mothers and daughters of three generations, who, during the course of a single day, reveal the depths of the legacy of alcoholism in their family. On this one day of startling revelations, the full extent of the family's secrets, kept still in the sweep of the years, begins to emerge. As the history of loss and regret unfolds, the women begin to sense those things within them, yet to be spoken, that have passed down from mother to daughter. In the end, we see the four women poised, however precariously, on the thresholds of trust, candor, forgiveness, and love.

Antebellum Natchez is most often associated with the grand and romantic aspects of the Old South and its landed gentry. Yet there was, as this book illustrates, another Natchez, the Natchez of ordinary citizens, small businessmen, and free Negroes, and the Natchez under-the-Hill of brawling boatmen, professional gamblers, and bold-faced strumpets.

Drawing on extensive research in the previously closed or unavailable archives of numerous archdioceses, diocese, and religious communities, Stephen Ochs shows that, in many cases, Roman catholic authorities purposely excluded Afro-Americans from their seminaries.

Presents an innovative study of Flannery O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her writing. Drawing on the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Brinkmeyer offers an explanation for the great depth and power of O'Connor's work, paying particular attention to the ways her art and audience bear upon her regnant Catholic vision.

Examines the byzantine complexities of Louisiana's restoration to the Union, from the capture of New Orleans to the downfall of the Radical Republicans a decade and a half later. Ted Tunnell writes with insight about wartime Reconstruction and the period of presidential Reconstruction, but his ultimate concern is with Radical Reconstruction.

Exhaustively researched, Death in a Promised Land is the compelling story of racial ideologies, southwestern politics, and yellow journalism, and of an embattled black community's struggle to hold onto its land and freedom.

John Hope Franklin, one of the US's foremost historians, collects twenty-seven of his most influential shorter writings. The essays are presented thematically and include pieces on southern history; significant but neglected historical figures; historiography; and the connection between historical problems and contemporary issues.

In this informed and comprehensive assessment of current issues in international politics, Kenneth W. Thompson addresses the role that traditions and values play in shaping change and in helping us to understand its implications.

In this first of a two-volume examination of the Cold War, Kenneth Thompson offers an account of its history and its historians. Thompson's aim is to find the best framework for understanding how the Cold War started, what forces produced it, how Soviet and American policies intensified the conflict, and what alternatives were open to the rivals.

First published in 1961, A New History of Spanish Literature has been a much-used resource for generations of students. The book has now been completely revised and updated to include extensive discussion of Spanish literature of the past thirty years.

Pushes away the elaborate conspiracy theories that have always surrounded Abrham Lincoln's death and uncovers exactly what can be known about the murder and its aftermath. Thomas Reed Turner strips away more than a century of speculation to retell with hard facts the history of Abraham Lincoln's death.

Thirty years after the publication of John Hope Franklin's influential interpretative essay Reconstruction, ten distinguished scholars have contributed to a new appraisal of Reconstruction scholarship. Recognising Professor Franklin's major contributions to the study of the era, their work of analysis and review has been dedicated to him.

In Carole Simmons Oles's fourth collection of poetry, small events of everyday life throw open a door to meditations on the absence of a husband, on the separation from children, and on the sustenance gained from friendship and the sorrow its loss. Each poem has an ambitious range, sure in its leap from subject to subject.

Shows how the struggles of black southerners to lift the barriers that had historically separated them from their white counterparts not only brought about the demise of white supremacy but did so without destroying the South's unique culture. Indeed, the book argues that the civil rights crusade has strengthened the South's cultural heritage.

First published in 1864, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice was the third novel of Augusta Jane Evans, one of the leading women writers of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Long out of print and largely unavailable until now, Macaria is a compelling narrative about women and war.

Dante Germino's biography of the Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci offers a major reassessment of this important twentieth-century thinker. Germino analyses Gramsci's remarkable life as well as his extensive oeuvre, from the early Turin articles to the meditative Prison Notebooks.

Challenging commonly held assumptions about the attitudes and actions of the pre-Civil War southern elite, Jane Turner Censer draws on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources to show that southern planters, at least in their relations with their children, were caring, affectionate, and surprisingly egalitarian.

Hailed by critics and scholars as the most valuable study of Faulkner's fiction, Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country explores the Mississippi writer's fictional county and the commanding role it played in so much of his work. Brooks shows that Faulkner's strong attachment to his region, with its rich particularity and deep sense of community, gave him a special vantage point from which to view the modern world. Brooks's consideration of such novels as Light in August, The Unvanquished, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust shows the ways in which Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County to examine the characteristic themes of the twentieth century. Contending that a complete understanding of Faulkner's writing cannot be had without a thorough grasp of fictional detail, Brooks gives careful attention to "what happens: In the Yoknapatawpha novels. He also includes useful genealogies of Faulkner's fictional clans and a character index.

In the fall of 1983 a group of scholars met at Purdue University for the American Historical Association Conference on the Study and Teaching of Afro-American history. This group included some of the most prominent historians and educators in their professions, and at this landmark meeting they assessed and evaluated the entire field of Afro-American history-its past, present, and future. The sponsorship of the American Historical Association officially acknowledged the coming of age of black history as a vital and respected part of American history. The contributions of many outstanding scholars and educators make The State of Afro-American History, the proceedings of that conference, an authoritative and provocative examination of the Afro-American experience during slavery and since emancipation. Individual essays cover the ways in which black slaves shaped their environment, the forces that influenced the black urban experience in the United States, the evolution of scholarship in Afro-American history, and the merger of American and Afro-American histories. The need for movement beyond the mere integration of blacks into existing textbooks and courses and the responsibility of the Afro-American scholar to the community are treated at length, as are media representation of black history and black women's history. The scholars are concerned with both the creation of histories and their dissemination through classrooms, texts, museums, and the popular media. Afro-American history is a relatively recent field of study, and the scholars represented in this book are only the fourth generation to pursue it. Earlier scholars have just recently gained wide recognition for their efforts. The contributors to this volume are very aware that they are living, reacting to, and shaping a history, as well as studying and teaching it. The effect of this dynamic on The State of Afro-American History is furthered by the essays' interactive structure: various pieces build on and critique other essays. This unique and remarkable volume will interest not only professional historians but students and secondary school teachers, school administrators, and librarians. It offers comprehensive and concise evaluations of where Afro-American history has been and is now, and suggestions for where it can go in the future.

Examines the work of the American black theatre's five most productive playwrights: Willis Richardson, Randolph Edmonds, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, and Ed Bullins. Sanders sees the history of black theater as the process of creating a 'black stage reality' while at the same time transforming conventions borrowed from white European culture.

Together now, the four poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain and Earthsleep counterpoint one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred to as "something like a verse novel," Fred Chappell has summoned up the rich veins of memory and brings this to bear on the contemporary sensibility.

The poems in this collection cover thirty years of loving contact with the endlessly varied surfaces of the world. They are poems in which the common furniture of our lives is always present, in which the universal resides in the local, in which elegance is born of clarity.

In the twenty years of its existence, the second series of the Southern Review continued the editorial orientation of the first series by presenting a range of regional and cosmopolitan works of fiction. This anthology is a collection of twenty-five short stories from the nearly three hundred published in the journal between 1965 and 1985.