Bøger udgivet af Louisiana State University Press

"With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison's evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison's legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation's ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race. Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation's past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison's ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting .... Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison's thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements. Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison's work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought"--

"Brown Pelican, the second book in LSU Press's 'Louisiana True' series of short novelty books about Louisiana culture, tells the history of the brown pelican in order to tell the history of our relationship with nature in Louisiana. We know the pelican as the state bird of Louisiana. Its image adorns our state flag: a mother pelican pierces her left breast with her beak to give a trio of hungry chicks sustenance. It is a symbol that dates back to early Christianity, a literal passion of the pelican, this most human of birds. Most anywhere the brown pelican roosts - along most of the nation's coastal outline - but especially in Louisiana, the bird embodies humankind's relationship with the environment. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the first National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican Island, Florida. The nation's second wildlife refuge, established the following year, likewise protected birds, principally pelicans, at Louisiana's Breton Island. In postwar America, the ubiquity of the pesticide DDT endangered the species. By the mid-1960s, not one viable pelican nest remained in all of Louisiana. Conservation efforts saved the brown pelican here and elsewhere, heralding one of the great success stories in animal preservation. However, the pelican is again under threat, particularly in lower Louisiana, due to coastal land loss. 'Pelican' combines history, travel, and first-person narrative to complicate, deconstruct, and reassemble our vision of the subject, the region, and ourselves"--

"Carl V. Harris's Segregation in the New South explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama, a critical southern industrial city. In the 1870s, African Americans in Birmingham were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery's old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites-elite and non-elite alike-worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the slave South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham's founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris's history. From the beginning of Reconstruction, southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans-the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. Harris's interpretation emphasizes the importance, even in early Reconstruction, of the white doctrine that Black freedpeople were inherently inferior, had inherited the abysmally low social status of slaves, and had to be rigorously excluded from social fellowship and social institutions. In the process, he reveals, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the post-Civil War South. Harris's study draws on an extensive body of research in social psychology rarely utilized by historians, including the creation of group boundaries that illuminate the social construction of races. This model is dynamic, revealing how groups develop and evolve through encounters with other groups. Using this methodology, Harris explores segregation within the social core of southern society, probing the motivations of whites who devised Jim Crow, identifying and assessing the relative importance of transactional versus socio-emotional factors in the origins of discrimination, and discussing the reasons for the prolonged survival of Jim Crow"--

"In The Last Southern Fire-Eater, renowned historian of the American South William Link examines the life of Roger Atkinson Pryor-a Virginia secessionist, Civil War general, and earnest advocate of postwar sectional reconciliation. Link shows that Pryor's life involved a series of re-makings. As a newspaper editor and politician, Pryor began his career as a moderate but eventually enthusiastically endorsed secessionism and war. Unlike most "fire-eaters," the nickname for hyper dis-unionists, Pryor experienced the Civil War in ways in which the brutality of the conflict undermined his assumptions about honor, manhood, and the value of war. In the decades after the conflict, he moved from Virginia to New York City, where, in another remaking, he became a celebrity defense attorney and advocate of reconciliation between North and South. Exploring the paths of an intriguing figure like Pryor allows Link to show that his journey was in many ways like that of the South-puzzling and contradictory. Indeed, Link casts Pryor as a central, perhaps representative figure during a crucial period in southern history between the 1850s and the close of the nineteenth century. Like the South, Pryor remade himself with the changing times. An archetypical southern-rights advocate, Pryor became a skilled practitioner in the politics of honor. Engaging in duels, attempted and genuine, he portrayed the world through the cultural prism of southern honor and assumed a more militant and aggressive stance on slavery than his southern peers. Later, he served prominently in the Civil War, rising to the rank of brigadier general and seeing action across the eastern theater. Captured late in the war, Pryor abandoned his fiery persona and renounced fire-eater extremism. He then moved north to New York City, where he became a prominent lawyer and advocate for the sort of intersectional reconciliation that became a central facet of what southern boosters were calling the New South. As Link shows, Pryor's lifetime encompassed dizzying changes. Born during the presidential administration of John Quincy Adams, he died four months after the end of World War I. He witnessed fundamental transformations in the South in the destruction of slavery, the defeat of the Confederacy, and the redefinition of manhood and honor among elite white men who no longer relied on dueling or personal violence"--

"Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centennial in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a still provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out the extent to which the polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape from the debates of the nation's founders, to the traditions of western romanticism, and to the whole juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book presents six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983 on his Brooklyn boyhood, his Harvard years, and the composition of his novel Ancient Evenings. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Hemingway, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, Joan Didion, and the historian Joseph Ellis. These pairings open up discussions of literature and politics encompassing war novels, Jungian self-analysis, second wave feminism and the women's liberation movement, the fragmentation and roiling revolt of the mid-1960s, the search for self-knowledge and inner truth, and how economic inequity and foreign policy can challenge the fundamentals of American democracy. Norman Mailer at 100 presents a new path into the author's life and work by encouraging a reconsideration of his career from his debut novel to his final books in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, underscoring the potential for finding in his work a new pertinence for the challenges of today"--

"This memoir describes how Freddie Pitcher made history in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by becoming the first Black elected to judgeships at three different levels of the court system. Pitcher recounts his early years in Valley Park-a semi-rural and segregated community-revealing that one of his cousins, a civil rights attorney, served as his role model and inspired him to become both a lawyer and change agent. He depicts what it was like to grow up in the segregated South and how the pangs of racial discrimination fueled his drive to challenge the norms of the Baton Rouge judiciary later in life. Pitcher discusses how he systematically forged together Black political organizations, the Black church community, and a group of white attorneys into a campaign coalition that ultimately helped him overcome the racial barriers that prevented Blacks from ascending to the judiciary in Baton Rouge. He details the strategy used to win seats on both the Baton Rouge City and the 19th Judicial District courts when many said a Black could not win a city- or parish-wide election. He later describes many of the challenges he faced as the first and only Black judge in Baton Rouge while highlighting some of the notable cases he tried and sharing his beliefs about judging and the judicial process. Pitcher's story will provide readers with an informative, educational, and inspirational perspective about how Blacks strove and persevered in their efforts to overcome the many roadblocks to their full participation in the political process related to the judiciary"--

Winner of the 2022 Civil War Books and Authors Book of the Year Award In Soldiers from Experience, Eric Michael Burke examines the tactical behavior and operational performance of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth US Army Corps during its first year fighting in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. Burke analyzes how specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the ranks led to the emergence of what he characterizes as a distinctive corps-level tactical culture. The concept--introduced here for the first time--consists of a collection of shared, historically derived ideas, beliefs, norms, and assumptions that play a decisive role in shaping a military command's particular collective approach on and off the battlefield. Burke shows that while military historians of the Civil War frequently assert that generals somehow imparted their character upon the troops they led, Sherman's corps reveals the opposite to be true. Contrary to long-held historiographical assumptions, he suggests the physical terrain itself played a much more influential role than rifled weapons in necessitating tactical changes. At the same time, Burke argues, soldiers' battlefield traumas and regular interactions with southern civilians, the enslaved, and freedpeople during raids inspired them to embrace emancipation and the widespread destruction of Rebel property and resources. An awareness and understanding of this culture increasingly informed Sherman's command during all three of his most notable late-war campaigns. Burke's study serves as the first book-length examination of an army corps operating in the Western Theater during the conflict. It sheds new light on Civil War history more broadly by uncovering a direct link between the exigencies of nineteenth-century land warfare and the transformation of US wartime strategy from "conciliation," which aimed to protect the property of Southern civilians, to "hard war." Most significantly, Soldiers from Experience introduces a new theoretical construct of small unit-level tactical principles wholly absent from the rapidly growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the intricacies and influence of culture on military operations.

"Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People That Inspired Ernest J. Gaines combines personal interviews, biography, and social history to tell the story of a plantation quarter and its most famous resident, renowned Louisiana writer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Ernest J. Gaines. In clear and vivid prose, this original and vital book illuminates the birthplace of a preeminent Black author and the lives of the people who inspired his work. Before he became an award-winning writer, Gaines was the son of sharecroppers in Cherie Quarters, the workers' community of River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupâee Parish, Louisiana. Drawing on decades of interviews and archival research, Ruth Laney explores the lives and histories of the families, both kin and not, who lived in a place where "everybody was everybody's child." Built as slave cabins in the 1840s, the houses of Cherie Quarters were cold in winter, hot in summer, filled with mosquitoes, and overflowing with people. Even so, the residents made these houses into homes. Laney describes aspects of their daily lives-work, food, entertainment, religion, and education-then expands her focus to the white families who built River Lake Plantation, enslaved its people, and later directed the lives of its Black sharecroppers. The twenty-first century saw the demise of Cherie Quarters. Like many landmarks of Black American life and history, the few remaining structures were razed or fell into ruin. Laney recounts the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of a small, dedicated group to preserve the vestiges of the community-two slave cabins, the church/schoolhouse, and a shed. Engaging and rich in detail, Cherie Quarters highlights the voices of those who called this special place home and shares the story of a lost way of life in South Louisiana"--

"In 1951, Hattie Lee Barnes, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman working as an overnight caretaker and maid at a county-line beer joint in southwestern Mississippi, shot and killed a white intruder. That man, twenty-two-year-old Lamar Craft, was breaking into the bar in the early morning hours, most likely to assault Barnes sexually. She confessed immediately to shooting him, at which point local police charged her with murder. Craft's family, one of prominence and influence, rejected Barnes's story that she was Lamar Craft's killer. Embarrassed by the circumstances in which he died, they asserted that Rob Lee, the white bar owner, was the actual murderer. Two of Craft's brothers thereafter tried to assassinate Lee but failed. Lee, concerned that Barnes might implicate him in the killing, shot her multiple times but failed to kill her. In Roadhouse Justice Trent Brown examines the long-forgotten circumstances surrounding Craft's death, revealing not only the details of his death and the lengthy court proceedings that followed, but also the precarious nature of Black lives under 1950s Mississippi justice. Barnes's court-appointed lawyer was twenty-five-year-old Joe Pigott. He and Charles Gordon, a reporter for the local newspaper, believed the prosecutors would attempt to unjustifiably convict Barnes of murder, sending her to state prison for life if not to the electric chair. Both men became strong advocates of her cause. At her murder trial later that year, the judge was Thomas Brady, a staunch segregationist who would become in the mid-1950s the leading intellectual light of the white supremist Citizens' Councils. Surprising nearly everyone, Pigott persuaded Brady to instruct the jury to deliver a directed verdict of not guilty. Hattie Barnes, however, was still not free. Despite her acquittal, Mississippi authorities continued to hold her in jail so that she would be available to testify against Rob Lee, the bar owner who shot her. At Lee's trial, which occurred over a year later, Barnes testified against him. A jury found Lee guilty, and a judge sentenced him to ten years in prison. The Craft family nonetheless continued to press authorities into indicting Lee for Lamar Craft's murder. They also filed suit against a life insurance company to construct an alternate explanation of his death. Two years after Barnes defended herself against Lamar Craft in the roadhouse, authorities finally freed her. As Brown points out, the broader story of the case illuminates the capricious nature of Mississippi justice, in which race, personal connections, and community pressures mattered a great deal. He rightly shows that Barnes was an uncommonly determined woman for not buckling under the enormous pressures she faced. Told here for the first time, the story of her tribulations and ultimate victory will attract readers interested in civil rights, legal studies, and Mississippi history"--

"The American Civil War saw the creation of the largest, most potent artillery force ever deployed in a conflict fought in the Western Hemisphere. Its size was about as large and powerful as any raised in prior European wars. Moreover, Union and Confederate artillery included the largest number of rifled pieces fielded in any conflict in the world up to that point. Amazingly, Earl Hess's "Civil War Field Artillery" is the first comprehensive general history of the artillery arm that supported infantry and cavalry in the conflict. Hess examines the major factors that affected artillerists and their work, including the hardware (cannons, carriages, limbers, caissons, tubes, and the fuses that exploded ordnance), the organization of artillery power (assembling batteries, battalions, regiments, Union artillery brigades, and Confederate artillery battalions), relationships between artillery officers and infantry/cavalry commanders, environmental factors on the battlefield, and many other influences on effectiveness as well. Hess's study offers numerous new interpretations of Civil War artillery based on deep and expansive research, especially in available statistical data. For example, in terms of organizing and managing the artillery arm, officers of the era and subsequent historians alike decried the early war practice of dispersing the guns and assigning them to infantry brigades or divisions where infantry officers completely commanded them. They also praised the concentration system most major field armies put into place during the latter half of the war. However, based on the evidence, Hess suggests that the dispersal system of the early part of the war did not inhibit the concentration of artillery power on the battlefield and that the concentration system of the latter half of the conflict failed to produce more concentration of guns. Another example relates to the effectiveness of fuses to explode long-range ordnance. Previous historians have praised those fuses, admitting they had initial problems early in the war, which each side fixed. Hess's research clearly shows that was not the case. Battery commanders continued to report bad fuses to the very end of the war. Cumulative data on what type of projectiles commanders fired in battle shows that they lessened their use of the new long-range exploding ordnance due to bad fuses while increasing their use of solid shot, the oldest artillery projectile in history. Hess's wide-ranging study argues that Civil War field artillery failed to live up to its promise, especially rifled pieces. As a general history, it also covers all aspects of the history of field artillery in the conflict, including the life of the artilleryman, the use of artillery horses, manpower replacement practices, the effect of widespread use of field fortifications on artillery performance, and the problems of resupplying batteries in the field. His comprehensive coverage and new interpretations bring the history of field artillery up to date and will contribute to a re-envisioning of the military history of the Civil War"--

"As thousands of African Americans freed themselves from slavery during the American Civil War, they launched the major social change of emancipation. Hundreds of northern antislavery reformers responded by working with them in the federally occupied South. The formerly enslaved Black refugees generally could bring little or no property to help them build a free life but could contribute labor and skills. They maintained pressure for new privileges. The relief workers, especially when organized by aid associations and serving under military personnel charged with supervising the freedom seekers, could draw upon more resources and exert some influence on programs.The two groups brought views and practices from their backgrounds, which could help or trouble the transition out of slavery. Enslaved Blacks had learned to act with independent-mindedness and wariness when dealing with whites. They resented the northerners' preconceptions and attempts to control the transition, especially the use of force. Some disgruntled formerly enslaved Blacks even evaded or opposed programs created for them. Conflicts occasionally led to program modifications but frequently moved Blacks to seek more autonomy. Still, working together did result in some accomplishments. In an exhaustive analysis of that interaction, John Cimprich shows how the unusual circumstances opened new possibilities, spawned social movements for change, generated challenges, and produced limited results. His work is the first comprehensive study of the two groups' collaboration and conflict, adding an essential chapter to the history of slavery's end in the United States. Cimprich suggests that federal policy affected much of that interaction but that individuals' attitudes also played a key role. While Blacks saw themselves as equal humans, only a minority of white reformers shared that view. Over time, most Black refugees came to appreciate the reformers' idealism and charity while maintaining a degree of distance because of reformers' critical views. In the end, both groups' ongoing efforts to gain formerly enslaved Blacks new privileges ultimately led to social change. Cimprich's study is sure to be of interest to historians of slavery and the Civil War"--

"While the role of engineers in the Civil War was critical to the success or failure of both armies, historians have until now not comprehensively examined the role of Confederate engineers in the western theater of the war. Larry J. Daniel's Engineering in the Confederate Heartland fills a gap in that historiography by analyzing the lives and accomplishments of professionally trained and novice engineers working for the Confederacy in the 175,000 square miles between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River, commonly referred to as the western theater of the war. Daniel's engrossing examination of Confederate engineers in the West is bound to be of widespread interest to both Civil War scholars and enthusiasts"--

"Drumsville! The Evolution of the New Orlean Beat traces the history of drums and drumming in New Orleans, tracing more than three centuries of drumming history that shaped the city into the musical powerhouse it is today. Created as a companion to the New Orleans Jazz Museum Exhibit of the same name, Drumsville! begins its story with the Native nations of Louisiana and moves through the arrival of European colonists and enslaved Africans bringing their cultures to New Orleans. The rich array of cultures that created the Crescent City are central to this visually stunning narrative, which traces the drummer's role in the evolution of brass bands, Black masking Indians, traditional and modern jazz, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, and funk. The drum set is so central to our conception of music that its origins are rarely questioned. But like all instruments, the drum set had to be invented, and New Orleans musicians-many of whom got their start by improvising and tinkering with everyday materials to create a beat-were central in its development. Drumsville! pays tribute to many of the musicians who have been important in developing the drum set and in the transmission of iconic rhythms, particularly the city's signature Second Line groove. Each section of the book draws its visuals from the historic photos, graphics, and photos of the percussion equipment and artifacts, while the text shares historical backgrounds, musicological analyses, and biographies of New Orleans musicians, including the many women drummers who have shaped and been shaped by the city's unique sound. Drummers interviewed for this book include Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste, Alfred "Uganda" Roberts, Willie Green, Adonis Rose, Ricky Sebastian, Johnny Vidacovich, Shannon Powell, Stanton Moore, Joe Lastie, Christie Jourdain, Joe Dyson, and Herlin Riley. Seamlessly weaving together stories of New Orleans drumming culture over the centuries, Drumsville! is a landmark study of the influence and contributions of New Orleans' unique drumming style to the musical world"--

"In the twenty-first century, precious little has been written about America's first professional author, Washington Irving, who was one of the most well-known and highly esteemed writers of the nineteenth century. Rip Van Winkle's Republic marks a rediscovery and reassessment of this marvelous author of social satire and fabled tales of the past. It evaluates Irving's mind, his unique take on the human condition, and the new understandings of early US culture afforded by renewed study of his large body of work, with special attention to his international bestseller The Sketch Book (1819-1820), the collection of tales that included the immortal "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." Edited by two eminent historians of early America, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Rip Van Winkle's Republic approaches the author and his times from a variety of angles. The book is, first of all, interdisciplinary in character, its contributors a mix of professional historians and literary scholars. The foreword, introduction, and ten original essays interweave critical thoughts on the growth of an independent American idiom along with the growth of American literature in a transatlantic market; the place of the American Revolution and treatment of indigenous Americans and African Americans in nineteenth-century literature; and the fragility of memory and construction of historical memory more broadly. As a bibliophile and, definitively, an antiquarian, or lover of the archive, Irving belongs in discussions of book culture. This volume also emphasizes Irving as a prominent figure in an age of literary celebrity. More than one of the contributors examine his place in the history of American theater and in film and television adaptations of his work. Finally, given his iconic status throughout America's first 100 years as a nation, Rip Van Winkle's Republic queries his curious disappearance from the literary canon over the past half-century"--