Louisiana State University Press – förlag

Thomas E. Patterson's monumental biography of Huey Long is a profound reevaluation of his life and legacy, recognizing him as an inspirational progressive thinker, populist hero, and radical influence on the New Deal before an assassin's bullet ended his life in 1935. First as governor and then as U.S. senator, Long transformed the politics of Louisiana by standing for the interests of citizens whom state officials had historically ignored. He eased suffrage restrictions so that more people could vote, and voters endorsed his program of more robust government services and shifting the tax burden to those better able to pay. In the United States Senate, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, he advocated loudly and ceaselessly for the redistribution of wealth, expanding public works, increasing the money supply, insuring bank deposits, paying old-age pensions and veterans' benefits, delivering a minimum income for families, and funding college and vocational education. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with other politicians and pundits, dismissed Long's proposals as nonsense put forth by a reckless demagogue in search of votes. Despite several biographies, acclaimed novels, and historical studies in the years since Long's death, his reputation today is mostly caricature: a spellbinding speaker, a dictator, a populist firebrand who was unprincipled and corrupt. Using previously untapped personal papers of Long and his son Russell, other primary sources, recent scholarship, and his experience as a lawyer, Patterson provides a necessary corrective as he analyzes the contours of Long's career, deconstructs the elements of his success, undercuts several myths related to his time in office, and explains the circumstances that led to his ultimate downfall. The result is the most comprehensive, balanced, and analytical study of the Kingfish to date.

A companion volume to Autumn of Glory.Most of the Civil War was fought on Southern soil. The responsibility for defending the Confederacy rested with two great military forces. One of these armies defended the ""heartland"" of the Confederacy- a vital area which embraced the state of Tennessee and large portions of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky.This is the story of that army- the first detailed study to be based upon research in manuscript collections and the first to explore the military significance of the heartland.The Army of Tennessee faced problems and obstacles far more staggering than any encountered by the other great Confederate force. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee's army was charged with the defense of an area considerably smaller in size. And while Lee's line of defense extended only about 125 miles, the front defended by the Army of Tennessee stretched for some 400 miles.Yet the Army of the Heartland has heretofore been given relatively slight attention by historians. With this volume Thomas Lawrence Connelly, a native Tennessean, has brought Confederate military history more nearly into balance.Throughout the war the Army of Tennessee was plagued by ineffective leadership. There were personality conflicts between commanding generals and corps commanders and breakdowns in communications with the Confederate government at Richmond. Lacking the leadership of a Lee, the Army of Tennessee failed to attain a real esprit at the corps level. Instead, the common soldiers, sensing the quarrelsome nature of their leaders, developed at regimental and brigade levels their own peculiar brand of morale which sustained them through continuous defeats.Connelly analyzes the influence and impact of each successive commander of the Army. His conclusions regarding Confederate command and leadership are not the conventional ones.

Boucherie traces the long evolution of Louisiana's butchering traditions—from their prehistoric origins to today's revived ritual celebrations—to reveal how foodways serve as both cultural archive and living performance. Drawing on ethnography, oral history, and memoir, Chase Cormier offers a richly layered portrait of the Louisiana boucherie as a site of labor, language, and identity. A former butcher turned scholar, Cormier brings a rare insider's perspective to the work of cutting, curing, and preparing meat. Through firsthand accounts of his apprenticeship in his grandfather's meat market, he invites readers behind the counter to witness the physical and communal dimensions of a vanishing craft. From the era of rural halle meat lockers to the rise of industrial packaging, Cormier chronicles a century of transformation in how Louisianans produce, consume, and converse about meat. At the heart of Boucherie lies an argument about conservation and conversation. Cormier contends that the preservation of traditional practices depends as much on communication—shared stories, recipes, and public discourse—as on the continuation of technique. Through analysis of cookbooks, televised chefs, and culinary marketing, he shows how "Cajun" cuisine emerged through processes of cultural appropriation, branding, and reinvention. These discursive forces, Cormier argues, shaped not only Louisiana's food culture but also broader ideas about race, heritage, and belonging. Richly historical and deeply personal, Boucherie situates Louisiana's butchering traditions within the wider currents of colonization, migration, and modernization. Cormier's narrative moves fluidly from prehistoric hunting to contemporary farm-to-table movements, demonstrating how global trends and local conversations continually redefine what counts as "authentic." Engagingly written and grounded in original fieldwork, Boucherie offers a rare and compelling study of tradition as a dynamic process. In exploring how a once-essential communal practice has become a symbol of regional identity, Cormier illuminates the fragility and the resilience of cultural memory in the modern South.

As Louis Armstrong forever tethered jazz to New Orleans and Clifton Chenier fixed Lafayette as home to zydeco, Slim Harpo established Baton Rouge as a base for the blues. In the only complete biography of this internationally renowned blues singer and musician, Martin Hawkins traces Harpo's rural upbringing near Louisiana's capital, his professional development fostered by the local music scene, and his national success with R&B hits like Rainin' in My Heart, Baby Scratch My Back, and I'm A King Bee, among others. Hawkins follows Harpo's global musical impact from the early 1960s to today and offers a detailed look at the nature of the independent recording business that enabled his remarkable legacy.With new research and interviews, Hawkins fills in previous biographical gaps and redresses misinformation about Harpo's life. In addition to weaving the musician's career into the lives of other Louisiana blues players—including Lightnin' Slim, Lazy Lester, and Silas Hogan—the author discusses the pioneering role of Crowley, Louisiana, record producer J. D. Miller and illustrates how Excello Records in Nashville brought national attention to Harpo's music recorded in Louisiana.This engaging narrative examines Harpo's various recording sessions and provides a detailed discography, as well as a list of blues-related records by fellow Baton Rouge artists. Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge will stand as the ultimate resource on the musician's life and the rich history of Baton Rouge's blues heritage.

The Civil War produced the largest cavalry force ever raised in American history. In Civil War Cavalry, Earl J. Hess examines that force comprehensively and from new perspectives, challenging standard views of the war's mounted arm. Hess surveys the organization, training, administration, arming, and mounting of cavalry units and examines mounted troops' tactical formations and maneuvers. He addresses the nature of cavalry operations, discussing the mounted charge, dismounted fighting, long-distance raids, the varied types of weapons used by troopers, and the difficulty of supplying horses. Hess also brings concepts from the burgeoning field of animal history to argue that cavalry mounts exercised a degree of agency in shaping their role in the large military machine. Civil War Cavalry is a sweeping and innovative history, establishing a new criterion for understanding how Americans waged mounted warfare in the mid-nineteenth century.

In Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Susan Tucker presents a revealing collection of oral-history narratives that explore the complex, sometimes enigmatic bond between black female domestic workers and their white employers from the turn of the twentieth century to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Based on interviews with forty-two women of both races from the Deep South, these narratives express the full range of human emotions and successfully convey the ties that united- and the tensions and conflicts that separated- these two mutually dependent groups of women.

As he enters his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David R. Slavitt remains a determined wildcatter who ranges as far as he thinks necessary to drill for meaning, wherever and however he can get it. In his new collection, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence.With Opus Posthumous and Other Poems—the title is a joke, as he remains very much alive—Slavitt presents an august work possessed of a richness toward which he has worked throughout his long life. By turns wry, erudite, and dyspeptic, this new volume offers ample rewards of his maturity.

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.An expectant father and university teacher on summer break, Abbott tackles the agonizing chores of each day, laboring for peace in his household and struggling to keep his daughter clean and happy, all while staving off a fear of failure as a parent, and even as a human being. As he cleans car seats, forgets to apply sun block, clips his dog's nails, dresses his daughter out of season, and makes unsuccessful furniture-buying trips with his wife, his mind plays out an unrelenting series of paradoxical reflections. Abbott's pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day in late June as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter's car seat and realises: ""The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.""Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror, Abbott Awaits is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the everyday battles and triumphs of parenthood.

Phillips came close to greatness as a historian, perhaps as close and any historian this country has produced. We may leave to those who live in the world of absolute good and evil the task of explaining how a man with such primitive views of fundamental social questions could write such splendid history. . . . He asked more and better questions than many of us still are willing to admit, and he carried on his investigations with consistent freshness and critical intelligence. . . . American Negro Slavery is not the last word on its subject; merely the indispensable first. - Eugene D. Genovese

Kirsten Thorup's Baby introduces us to strangers, the outsiders: misfits, deviants, losers, the powerless, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are the other side of the coin, the failures.The novel opens in the Mexicana, a cheap nightclub in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen, where several acquaintances are gathered together in a meaningless, hand-to-mouth companionship. When the club closes, they go their own ways, never to return to the club again a dispersion that gives the book its basic pattern of wandering and aimlessness and no neatly rounded closing of the circle.Their tracts zigzag through the city. We follow Mark, the untalented auto salesman with the Orson Welles profile who is heavily in debt and does not know how to get out, home to his money-grubbing wife who get household income by selling herself to the loan shark who has Mark in his clutches. We follow Suzie on a drunken spree in Sweden with a couple of delinquents. We visit Leni, who has never written the book she wants to write because she has had to support herself by translating porno magazines. We go with her to the home of her former husband, Eddy, who once owned the run-down apartment where Karla, a single mother with two children, now lives. Eddy is the central to the story. He is the spider; his money, and its power, are the poison.Permeating the everyday lives of these characters is an experience that perhaps a woman best can formulate: the experience of being a thing, an object rather than a subject, a receiver, of bribery, of blows and bruises, of caresses, or persuasive words. And perhaps a woman's sensitivity is also particularly suited to describing this state with the unsentimental tenderness that Kirsten Thorup manifests in Baby.Baby 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.

The Evolving Project of Cormac McCarthy presents eleven essays of original scholarship that undertake a programmatic reassessment of McCarthy's literary and philosophical worldview. Examining issues of race, morality, history, metaphysics, law, economics, and ecology in McCarthy's writing reveals how these themes intersect in an overarching, positive gesture that characterizes his work. Taken together, the essays offer a more expansive understanding of McCarthy's critique of contemporary society, while providing new clarity on his vision of alternate ways of living and community beyond their present life-denying manifestations.

In one of his most important books, the renowned historian Eugene D. Genovese examines slave revolts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, placing them in the context of modern world history. By studying the conditions that favoured these revolts and the history of slave guerrilla warfare throughout the Western Hemisphere, he connects the ideology of the revolts to the ideology of the great revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century.Genovese finds that the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, constituted a turning point in the history of the slave revolts and, indeed, in the history of the human spirit. By claiming for his enslaved brothers and sisters the same right to human dignity that the French bourgeoisie claimed for itself during the French Revolution, Toussaint began the process by which slave uprisings changed from secessionist rebellions to revolutionary demands for liberty, equality, and justice.

The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain-going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures-with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself. Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women played a vital part in sustaining the Rebel efforts, and accordingly he treated them as wartime opponents, targeting their markers of respectability and privilege. Although Sherman intended his efforts to demoralize the civilian population, Frank suggests that his strategies frequently had the opposite effect. Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general. Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occurred in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim.

Both history and memoir, The Flight tells the story of Richard W. "Dick" Bridges's heroic service in World War II. Bridges survived a German attack on his plane, the Fascinatin' Witch, by parachuting out of the exploding B-24. He escaped detection in Austria, became the first American prisoner of war in Hungary, was sent to Yugoslavia, escaped from his POW camp there, was sheltered by the Partisans one step ahead of the Germans, and was finally airlifted to safety in Italy by the British.Bridges's story, which seems almost too astonishing to be true, went untold until after his death in 2003, when his son, Tyler Bridges, pieced it together. The younger Bridges's odyssey in search of his father's wartime experiences connected him with the families of other crew members aboard the Fascinatin' Witch and led him to retrace his father's footsteps through Austria, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia.With his findings, Bridges has woven a story not only about World War II and the bravery of this unique group of soldiers, but also about fathers and sons, what can get lost in the gulf between generations, and how patience and understanding can bridge that gap.

Founded in 1917, Paramount Records incongruously was one of several homegrown record labels of a Wisconsin chair-making company. The company pinned no outsized hopes on Paramount. Its founders knew nothing of the music business, and they had arrived at the scheme of producing records only to drive sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they had recently begun manufacturing.Lacking the resources and the interest to compete for top talent, Paramount's earliest recordings gained little foothold with the listening public. On the threshold of bankruptcy, the label embarked on a new business plan: selling the music of Black artists to Black audiences. It was a wildly successful move, with Paramount eventually garnering many of the biggest-selling titles in the "race records" era. Inadvertently, the label accomplished what others could not, making blues, jazz, and folk music performed by Black artists a popular and profitable genre. Paramount featured a deep roster of legendary performers, including Louis Armstrong, Charley Patton, Ethel Waters, Son House, Fletcher Henderson, Skip James, Alberta Hunter, Blind Blake, King Oliver, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Johnny Dodds, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Scott Blackwood's The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records is the story of happenstance. But it is also a tale about the sheer force of the Great Migration and the legacy of the music etched into the shellacked grooves of a 78 rpm record. With Paramount Records, Black America found its voice. Through creative nonfiction, Blackwood brings to life the gifted artists and record producers who used Paramount to revolutionize American music. Felled by the Great Depression, the label stopped recording in 1932, leaving a legacy of sound pressed into cheap 78s that is among the most treasured and influential in American history.

In this powerful collection, Chelsea Rathburn seeks to voice matters once deemed unspeakable, from collisions between children and predators to the realities of postpartum depression. Still Life with Mother and Knife considers the female body, ""mute and posable,"" as object of both art and violence. Once an artist's model, now a mother, Rathburn knows ""how hard / it is to be held in the eyes of another."" Intimate and fearless, her poems move in interlocking sections between the pleasures and dangers of childhood, between masterpieces of art and magazine centerfolds, and- in a gripping sequence in dialogue with Delacroix's paintings and sketches of Medea- between the twinned ferocities of maternal love and rage. With singular vision and potent poetic form, Rathburn crafts a complex portrait of girlhood and motherhood from which it is impossible to look away.

Winner of the 2026 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father's placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure. At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.

Lyndon Johnson focuses on the five-plus years of Johnson's presidency (1963–1969), a tumultuous time in which the promise of progressive social programs and basic human rights was countered by a war that killed millions of people and devastated the lives of countless more. As Johnson tried to pull the United States closer to some of its professed ideals, he also undermined many Americans' faith in government, the contradictions of which are still felt to this day. Throughout a carefully wrought and narratively propulsive book-length poem, Jonathan Farmer implicates himself, questioning what it means to belong in America, amid widespread inequality and the great historical inheritance of violence. Farmer reflects on his own upbringing, his relationship with his father who served in Vietnam, and the implications of the sixties for our world today. Unfolding over seven sections, plus an epilogue, the book begins immediately after John F. Kennedy's death as Johnson is thrust into the seat of power, and spans the entire Johnson presidency, capturing both broad portions of history and fascinatingly minute detail. All the while we understand Farmer's own frustration with America as it stands today, still far away from the ideals of the 1960s, still unable to fulfill its promise. Yet, ultimately, Lyndon Johnson is a hopeful work, filled with longing for a country that could still follow through on its putative ideals.

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Mardi Gras festivities don't end after the parades roll through the streets; rather, a large part of the celebration continues unseen by the general public. Retreating to theaters, convention centers, and banquet halls, krewes spend the post-parade evening at lavish balls, where members cultivate a sense of fraternity and reinforce the organization's shared values through pageantry and dance. In New Orleans Carnival Balls, Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of these exclusive soirees, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders. The oldest Carnival organizations—the Mistick Krewe of Comus, Twelfth Night Revelers, Krewe of Proteus, Knights of Momus, and Rex—emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. These old-line krewes ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I, and the traditions of their private balls reflected a need for group solidarity amidst a world in flux. For these organizations, Carnival balls became magical realms where krewesmen reinforced their elite identity through sculpted tableaux vivants performances, mock coronations, and romantic ballroom dancing. This world was full of possibilities: krewesmen became gods, kings, and knights, while their daughters became queens and maids. As the old-line krewes cultivated a sense of brotherhood, they used costume and movement to reaffirm their group identity, and the crux of these performances relied on a specific mode of expression—dancing. Using the concept of dance as a lens for examining Carnival balls, Atkins delves deeper into the historical context and distinctive rituals of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Beyond presenting readers with a new means of thinking about Carnival traditions, Atkins's work situates dance as a vital piece of historical inquiry and a mode of study that sheds new light on the hidden practices of some of the best-known krewes in the Big Easy.

Animals mattered in the Civil War. Horses and mules powered the Union and Confederate armies, providing mobility for wagons, pulling artillery pieces, and serving as fighting platforms for cavalrymen. Drafted to support the war effort, horses often died or suffered terrible wounds on the battlefield. Raging diseases also swept through army herds and killed tens of thousands of other equines. In addition to weaponized animals such as horses, pets of all kinds accompanied nearly every regiment during the war. Dogs commonly served as unit mascots and were also used in combat against the enemy. Living and fighting in the natural environment, soldiers often encountered a variety of wild animals. They were pestered by many types of insects, marveled at exotic fish while being transported along the coasts, and took shots at alligators in the swamps along the lower Mississippi River basin.Animal Histories of the Civil War Era charts a path to understanding how the animal world became deeply involved in the most divisive moment in American history. In addition to discussions on the dominant role of horses in the war, one essay describes the use of camels by individuals attempting to spread slavery in the American Southwest in the antebellum period. Another explores how smaller wildlife, including bees and other insects, affected soldiers and were in turn affected by them. One piece focuses on the congressional debate surrounding the creation of a national zoo, while another tells the story of how the famous show horse Beautiful Jim Key and his owner, a former slave, exposed sectional and racial fault lines after the war. Other topics include canines, hogs, vegetarianism, and animals as veterans in post–Civil War America.The contributors to this volume—scholars of animal history and Civil War historians—argue for an animal-centered narrative to complement the human-centered accounts of the war. Animal Histories of the Civil War Era reveals that warfare had a poignant effect on animals. It also argues that animals played a vital role as participants in the most consequential conflict in American history. It is time to recognize and appreciate the animal experience of the Civil War period.

In The Art of Looking Back, Maggie McKinley evaluates the complex nature of nostalgia in the canon of Joan Didion, a theme that has often been taken for granted, oversimplified, and misunderstood. In reassessing this fraught concept, McKinley emphasizes the productive rather than regressive or escapist qualities of nostalgia in Didion's work, highlighting its role as a critical tool used to dissect cultural myths and understand individual identity. McKinley's contextualized analysis offers a nuanced understanding of Didion's views of American history, national rhetoric, hubris, gender politics, grief and loss, and more, underscoring why Didion's writing remains deeply relevant as a cultural touchstone in the twenty-first century.

In Refusal, her searing new collection of poetry, Jenny Molberg draws on elements of the uncanny- invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons & Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide- to investigate trauma, addiction, and forces of oppression. Exposing the effects of widespread toxic misogyny, this confrontational volume examines societal, cultural, and personal gaslighting in situations of domestic abuse. As Molberg writes in Loving Ophelia Is, ""love and hate simultaneously is the trick of abuse / and the trick of abuse is a vexation of the mind."" A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, while another series on a mother's struggle with addiction captures the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs heavily on a woman's position in the world.

Jenny Molberg's third collection of poetry, The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Drawing inspiration from true crime investigations and artifacts, including Frances Glessner Lee's crime scene dioramas and the tragic aftermaths of two serial killers who preyed upon women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Molberg probes a cultural obsession with violence that performs active erasure of victims' lives. By engaging with historical texts through a personal lens, she sheds light on survivors who do not find justice and looks toward a future of positive systemic reformation.

In 1763 the oppressive program of Grenville set up a tempo of resentment. Virginia and Maryland soon struck against the abuse of liberty, with Patrick Henry as their spokesman. Rioting followed the Carolinas and Georgia. With the Townshend Acts of 1767 the crisis worsened. In nine more years the ""Tea and Trumpets"" period, to use Mr. Alden's phrase, would explode into the Revolution.These events form but a single, bright strand in the intricate story of the South during the Revolution. This volume, the first complete account yet written of an exciting period, ranges from the demography of the South (including White, Negro, and Indian groups), through the War of Independence, into the critical early years of the Union.The emphasis throughout is upon political and social change. The network of historic conditions and human motives is treated with consummate skill; and the heroic story of the war, with its gallery of personalities on both sides, is vigorously narrated.The book also gives a valuable account both of the origins and evolution of Southern sectionalism and of the role of the South in creating the Union. Besides the full-scale record of the colony-states on the Atlantic seaboard, the development of the Old Southwest is brilliantly detailed, including Indian warfare, the settlement of Kentucky and Tennessee, and many other related topics.

The first thirty years under the Federal Constitution encompass the most obscure period of Southern history. Thomas P. Abernethy brings this turbulent era into full focus for the first time in this book, Volume IV of A History of the South. With Spain in possession of Florida and Louisiana, claiming and partially occupying everything west of the Alleghenies and south of the Tennessee River, and with England and France attempting to exploit Spain's weakness to strengthen their own positions in the New World, the Southern frontier was beset by active or potential enemies during most of the three decades under consideration. Thus the protection of our Southern and Western borders is one of the main themes of this volume. The South, of course, was not all frontier country, and the history of the well-established civilisation of the South Atlantic states has not been neglected. Among the significant political and social developments which the author has reviewed at length are the transition form Washingtonian Federalism to Jeffersonian Republicanism; the unprecedented vast speculation in Western lands and their political repercussions; the separatist intrigues in the early West; such episodes of the Jefferson administration as the Louisiana Purchase, the Burr Conspiracy and the Embargo; and the events leading up to the War of 1812 and the Southern phase of the conflict. The product of many years of sustained effort on the part of a major Southern historian, The South in the New Nation adds significantly to our knowledge of American history.

This book is the trade edition of Volume VI of A History of The South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Growth of Southern Nationalism is written by an outstanding student of Southern history.The growth of Southern nationalism was largely the product of relations of the South to other states and to the Federal government. Often what happened in the North and the reaction of Northern men to events determined Southern action and reaction. The sections were being drawn closer together and their interests more and more entwined. That was one of the great reasons for the increased friction and discord.The sectional quarrel developed largely around slavery as a thing in itself and then as a symbol of all differences and conflicts. The reduction of the struggle to the simple terms of Northern ""rights"" and Southern ""rights"" placed issues beyond the abilities of the democratic process and rendered the great masses in both sections helpless before the drift into war.The break could not have been avoided, according to Mr. Craven, unless either the North of the South had been willing to yield its position on an issue that involved matters of ""right"" or ""rights."" Neither could do so because slavery and come to symbolize values in each of their social-economic structures for which men fight and die but which they do not give up or compromise.

This book is the trade edition of Volume VII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Confederate States of America is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series and the author of Volume VIII.The drama of war has led most historians to deal with the years 1861 to 1865 in terms of campaigns and generals. In this volume, however, Mr. Coulter treats the war in its perspective as an aspect of the life of a people.The attempt to build a nation strong enough to win independence naturally drew Southerners' attention to such problems as morale, money, bonds, taxes, diplomacy, manufacturing, transportation, communication, publishing, armaments, religion, labor, prices, profits, race problems, and political policy. Mr. Coulter balances these phases of the struggle in their relation to war itself, and the whole is dealt with as a period in the history of a people. And finally, Mr. Coulter deals with the ever-recurring questions: Did secession necessarily mean war? Was the South from the very beginning engaged in a hopeless struggle? And, if not, why did it lose?

This book is Volume VIII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The South During Reconstruction is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series.The tragic Reconstruction period still casts its long shadow over the South. In his study, Mr. Coulter looks beyond the familiar political and economic patterns into the more fundamental attitudes and activities of the people. In this dismal period of racial and political bitterness, little notice has been taken of the strivings for reorganisation of agriculture under free labor, for industrial and transportation development, for a free-school system and higher education, and for the advance of religious, literary, and other cultural interests. Mr. Coulter's book shows these things to be very real, and they are related to the Radical program, which, conceived both in good and evil, ran its course and finally collapsed.This period forms an important chapter in American history. It is an account of a region, defeated in one of the world's great wars, struggling to rebuild its social and economic structure and to win back for itself a place in the reunited nation.

The history of the South in this century has been obscured in the ever-growing mass of information about the region's rapid change and turbulent development. In this book, Volume X of A History of the South, the historical image of the modern South is brought into full focus for the first time. George Brown Tindall presents a thorough and well-balanced historical narrative of the region during the years 1913-1945 when the South underwent a transformation from a predominantly agricultural area to one of growing industrialization. The inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson ended a half century of political isolation for the South and ushered in an era of agrarian reforms, prohibition, woman suffrage, industrial growth, and recurring crises for Southern farmers. During the 1920's the South was caught in a contrast of urban booms and farm distress. There were flareups of racial violence, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived. Mr. Tindall devotes considerable attention to the Southern literary renaissance which produced William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and many other notable writers and critics. The Emergence of the New South provides a new understanding of the changing political and social climate in the South under the stresses of depression, the New Deal, the Labor movement, Negro unrest, and two world wars.