Books published by Louisiana State University Press

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren--each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I'll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades. Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.

Offers a fresh and unconventional introduction to the history of Latin American international relations, from colonial times to the present. In this volume, the authors offer a pioneering study from a perspective that has been ignored in English-language books, that of the Latin American nations themselves.

This collection of fifty-two poems from the author of Angel Fire and Anonymous Sins explores the annihilation of the time-bound ego, a liberating, sometimes terrifying experience for all who live within the "fabulous beast" of history and nature. The poems explore the shifting, elusive point at which the inwardness of individual experience touches upon the larger consciousness of a species or an era, forming a connection with a "self" that goes beyond subjectivity.The poems are grouped into four parts: "Broken Connections," "Forbidden Testimonies," "The Child-Martyr" and "A Posthumous Sketch," are prose poems which, though technically different from the others, are concerned with the same theme-the relationship between the individual and a larger, all-inclusive whole. Neither fatalistic nor rebellious, the poems convey the idea that as long as we live in time we must struggle, and that is this struggle that determines our humanity.

"A magisterial and landmark work, one that merits wide and thoughtful readership not only by historians, but, more important, by those of us who count on historians to tell us truly about our past." - New York Times

Historians have come to think on the late nineteenth century as America's Gilded Age. But in Louisiana it was a time of conflict and repression. Professor William Ivy Hair has captured the essence of Louisiana life and politics during this era, the decades that followed the end of Reconstruction.

Eugene Talmadge's career as a politician lasted twenty years, and during that time he dominated Georgia's political structure as few men have in any state's history. The Wild Man from Sugar Creek is a fascinating biography of one of the South's most colourful political figures.

"American scholarship is richer for this unique exercise. More important, the great community,... one again sorely beset by unsettled problems of sectional rivalry and world tension, can read this book with great profit. Too few historians put their talents at the disposal of society so effectively." - American Historical Review

For more than forty years William Dean Howells counted Mark Twain among his closest friends. Twain's death on April 21, 1910, moved Howells to record his memories of the author. These were published in book form along with Howells' criticism of Mark Twain's work. This is the first new edition of the book since the original printing in 1910.

Cutting across the Bourbon Era, the Populist Revolt, and the Progressive Movement, Hoke Smith's career gave expression to the Southern politics of his generation. In tis volume, Dewey Grantham examines in detail the central role of this leader as a key to the better understanding of the political mind of the New South.

George Washington Cable, compared in his lifetime to Dickens and Daudet and praised in Moscow as a disciple of Turgenev, was more than a local colourist of Creole days in New Orleans. He was a crusader as well - and a crusader for a dangerously unpopular cause. This biography of Cable was originally published in 1956 by Duke University Press.

Originally published in 1969, this work deals with the politics of the southern states' resistance to public school integration. The text documents the opposition to de-segregation in each southern state and clarifies the attitudes underlying the massive resistance to integration.

Troy H. Middleton (1889-1976) was the youngest colonel in the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. Later, he served as commander of the Army's 45th Division and then the VIII Corps. During World War II, Middleton spent more time in combat than any other general officer. General Middleton made key tactical decisions in the largest and most complex military action in which the U.S. Army has ever been involved--the Battle of the Bulge. In 1951, Louisiana State University's board of supervisors appointed Middleton president of the university. He had previously served at the school as commandant of cadets, professor of military science, dean, and vice president. While president of LSU, Middleton oversaw a sustained period of growth and academic achievement. Like many other university presidents in the Jim Crow era, throughout his tenure at LSU, he also staunchly upheld his institution's deeply-racist segregationist policies. In this thoroughly researched biography, Frank James Price tells Middleton's life story from his boyhood plantation days in Copiah County, Mississippi, to his public service achievements after his retirement as president of Louisiana State University in 1962. In much of the book, the author, through taped interviews, allows Middleton to tell his own story. In researching the book, Price interviewed and/or corresponded with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Omar Bradley, and other personal acquaintances of General Middleton.

Examines the efforts of black Americans in England to advance the cause of their own freedom. Speaking to enthusiastic working-class crowds in the cities and lobbying in the salons of the wealthy and aristocratic, black Americans used England as a forum to tell the world of their cruel plight in the United States.

The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker was his ability to bridge the worlds of blues and jazz. Stormy Monday is the first biography of T-Bone Walker to be published. The book offers a remarkable frank insider's account of the life of a blues musician and compulsive gambler.

Rachel O'Connor was an extraordinary woman. For nearly fifty years (from 1797 to 1846), she lived on a plantation near Bayou Sara. And for twenty-five of those years, she managed the plantation alone. Not a biography in the conventional sense, Avery Craven's charming little book is rather the story of Rachel and the Louisiana in which she lived.

In this investigative look into Kentucky's race relations from the end of the Civil War to 1940, George Wright brings to light a consistent pattern of legally sanctioned and extralegal violence employed to ensure that blacks knew their "place" after the war.

In tracing the course of Renato Beluche's chameleonlike career, this biography by Jane Lucas De Grummond gives us a panoramic view of the complex affairs of the Caribbean during one of the most volatile periods in its history.

Offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labour movement. Paul Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a compelling labour-race theorem: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do - control the labour supply.

Ted Tunnell's superbly researched biography of Marshall H. Twitchell is a major addition to Reconstruction literature. This first full-length study of Twitchell is edifying, entertaining, and cutting-edge scholarship.

Tina Modotti, known to a few as the beautiful Italian actress in Erich von Stroheim's silent film Greed, was also a dedicated political activist and photographer whose best work has a powerful dignity and integrity. Margaret Gibson's Memories of the Future is based on Modotti's vivid but enigmatic life.

Based on research in documents and family correspondence as well as interviews with descendants of immigrants, this study by Lucy Cohen is the first history of the Chinese in the Reconstruction South - their rejection of the role that planter society had envisioned for them and their adaptation into a less rigid segment of rural southern society.

This early work by the esteemed historian Charles P. Roland draws from an abundance of primary sources to describe how the Civil War brought south Louisiana's sugarcane industry to the brink of extinction, and disaster to the lives of civilians both black and white.

This reissue of a largely forgotten book by Evelyn Waugh will be the first in our new series edited by John Maxwell Hamilton, From Our Own Correspondent. Waugh's hilarious novel, Scoop, is said to be the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a Bible. Along with generations of general readers, the correspondents swear by and laugh at the antics of reporters in Waugh's fictional Ishmaelia. Few readers, however, are as acquainted with this title. It is Waugh's memoir of his time as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia, what is today Ethiopia, during the mid-1930's when Italy invaded the hapless country. Waugh's account, though often criticized for its endorsement of the Italian invasion, provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini's imperial strides. It also introduces Waugh's famous wit and the characters and follies that figure into his notorious satire.

Argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. Drew Gilpin Faust shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism "as the South's commentary upon itself.

Offers an impressively broad examination of slave resistance in America, spanning the colonial and antebellum eras in both the North and South and covering all forms of recalcitrance, from major revolts and rebellions to everyday acts of disobedience.

In Parallel Histories, James S. Amelang reconstructs the compelling struggle of converts in Spain to coexist with a Christian majority that suspected them of secretly adhering to their ancestral faiths and destroying national religious unity in the process.