Bücher veröffentlicht von Louisiana State University Press

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".

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."

Sportsmen will find pleasant reading in this rich collection of tales of hunting in the Old South. The book will be of particular interest to those enthusiasts who savour a good hunting yarn for its own sake and enjoy hearing of the old days when the supply of game seemed endless and the field sports were an integral part of everyday life.

The thirty years prior to the Civil War were flamboyant and fiery times for the South. People had a passion for political issues and an ear for the lusty oratory that could be heard at any gathering. Oratory in the Old South looks past the popular myths of the era and uncovers the true nature of the oratory of the times.

The first comprehensive study of Harry S. Truman as commander in chief, this is an important and highly relevant book, especially in view of the growing concern over the president's ability to wage war without the consent of either the Congress or the American people.

This first collection of the essays of the late T. Harry Williams brings together some of the best shorter works of a man who was, by any standard, one of the finest historians of our time. Spanning the range of Williams' interests, this volume contains essays on the Civil War, Reconstruction, the ear of the world wars, military affairs, the craft of the historian, and the careers of Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, and Lyndon Johnson. Williams' reputation rests on such large-scale works as Lincoln and His Generals and the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Huey Long--exhaustively researched studies, monumental in their scope and ambition. Providing Williams with the chance to let his gaze probe beyond the fixed borders of such works, the essay was a flexible medium in which he could freely pursue some of the ideas that grew out of his daily regimen of writing and reading. He used the essay to examine large themes that spanned many areas of his interests as well as specific incidents in the course of American history, to reach both a popular audience and his fellow historians, to test ideas for books in the planning stage, and to assess the works of his colleagues. Among the essays brought together in this volume are "That Strange Sad War," in which Williams examines the Civil War as the first truly, and tragically, modern war; "Abraham Lincoln: Pragmatic Democrat," which sees Lincoln as the supreme example in our history of the union of principle and pragmatism in politics; and "The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873," which traces the short history of an ambitious attempt to bring about racial unity in Reconstruction Louisiana. In "Interlude: 1918-1939"--an essay published here for the first time--Williams analyzes the weakened state of American military preparedness before Franklin Roosevelt came into office and turned his attention to the growing threat of Hitler's Germany. In "The Macs and the Ikes: America's Two Military Traditions," Williams contrasts the opposing types of military leaders in American history--those generals in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower who follow orders and submit to the power of the president and Congress, and the more fractious generals such as Douglas Macarthur, who view the military as an aristocracy of courage and genius and bridle at the reigns of civilian authority. "Huey, Lyndon, and Southern Radicalism" traces the common political roots of two men Williams considered among the most successful "power artists" of the century. And in "Lyndon Johnson and the Art of Biography," Williams discusses his own plans to write a biography of Johnson and speaks of his unapologetic belief in a great-man theory of history.

Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy's son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will's nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy. Known as the "gray eagle of the delta" for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family's property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy's death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father's law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father's long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan's grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state's rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the "White Chief." It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues' fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father's side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will's true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past--his memoir Lanterns on the Levee. "During my day," he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, " I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity." It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family's values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.

From contemporary newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and diaries, this book fashions a fascinating story of a great actress and her contribution to the development of American repertory theatre during this vital period.

William Hoffman is a master storyteller, and Follow Me Home reveals him at his inimitable best. In these superbly crafted stories, he explores one of the most secret places of the human heart - the corner where we keep hidden the precious supply of whatever it is that lets us persist, and sometimes even triumph.

Chosen by Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson before her death in 1985 to publish her husband's secret love letters, Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White has prepared a fascinating edition of these unique letters for the enjoyment of students and scholars of literature as well as for all readers who savour compelling and inspiring stories of loss and love.

In 1920 Thomas Wolfe left the South with the strong desire to become a dramatist. To pursue his chosen craft, he enrolled in the Harvard 47 Workshop, at that time the most renowned in the nation. At first he wrote plays about Appalachian society and the Civil War. But it was not until Wolfe turned to the modern South--inspired by a disturbing return to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina--that his genius awoke. There he found the material he would work into the best of his three full-length plays written at Harvard, the material that in the next decade would be recast into the novels that would make him famous. This is the first book publication of Welcome to Our City, Thomas Wolfe's play in ten scenes of a modern South ruled by liars and real estate agents, overrun with boosterism, and dedicated to greed. This sprawling, fiery work has lain dormant among Wolfe's papers for over fifty years, abandoned by its author after an unsuccessful attempt to revise and shorten it for a New York Theatre Guild production. For this edition, Richard S. Kennedy has reassembled a full performance text of the workshop version presented at Harvard in 1923--a production that involved forty-five cast members, including over thirty speaking parts, required seven stage changes, and lasted over three and a half hours in performance. The action of Welcome to Our City centers on a scheme of the town fathers and real estate promoters of Altamont, a small southern city, to snatch up all the property in a centrally located black district, evict the tenants, tear down their houses and shops, and build a new white residential section in its place. When the blacks, under the angry leadership of a strong-willed doctor, resist eviction, a race riot breaks out--shattering both the precarious social balance of the city and the "progressive" dreams of Altamont's boosters. Building on this plot, Wolfe guides his audience through the back rooms, stately homes, ans shanty towns of Altamont, contrasting tradition-bound southern characters with a new breed of life drawn from the vast menagerie of 1920s Main Street America: fact-spouting yes-men, hypocritical religious leaders, anti-intellectual professors, provincial country club matrons, and politicians inauthentic from their heads to their feet. Welcome to Our City is not merely an exhibit in the artistic development of a future novelist. Wolfe used the dramatic form inventively and with considerable inspiration to expose the culture of greed that he saw spreading around him and to caricature the men who, he feared, would usher in an age of mediocrity across America. Emotionally gripping and mockingly satiric, Welcome to Our City captures the festering social climate of the 1920s in a vision of life that is uncomfortably relevant to our own times.

Are we using the best system of values to examine the nation's political problems? Must we forsake idealism for realism? These are two questions that Kenneth Thompson systematically discusses in his penetrating examination of the role that values play in America's political relations with the other nations of the world.

Examines the interlocking careers and influence of six black clergymen, two of them fugitive slaves, who lived in the antebellum North and protested the racism of the time. The book is a biography of these six widely respected clergymen as well as an important discussion of Afro-American activism in the North before the Civil War.

Dominated by the personalities of three towering figures of the US's middle period - Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson - Olive Branch and Sword tells of the political and rhetorical duelling that brought about the Compromise of 1833, resolving the crisis of the Union caused by South Carolina's nullification of the protective tariff.