Bücher veröffentlicht von Louisiana State University Press

Having lived behind the scenes during the Big Band era of the thirties and forties, Drew Page invites us to share that era with him. An instrumentalist or sideman, in many touring bands, he recounts friendships with now-famous as well as unknown musicians who made American dance music. Like them, Drew Page loved his music and the road.

With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum American South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South.

The Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s and the violent controversies that surrounded it appeared to pass two very different judgments on the France of the Third Republic. The outcome o the trial--Captain Dreyfus convicted without guilt and the real traitor acquitted despite guilt--demonstrated without question the extraordinary hypocrisy of the military justice system. But the furor raised by Dreyfus' conviction and the agitation for his release suggested that the injustice of the courts' verdict was uncharacteristic of French society; that for France as a nation the rendering of justice was paramount, even at the expense of disgracing both the military and a conspiring government. In The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque, Benjamin Martin examines the events of three sensational criminal cases to reveal that the willful mangling of justice that occurred in the Dreyfus trial was far from rare in the Third Republic France. He finds, in fact, that justice in the Belle Epoque was "hypocritical in the extreme," with the outcome of trials easily tainted by the power and influence of politics, money, and illicit sex. At times, justice deviated so far from the ideal that its goal was not the strict application of the law or even the discovery of the truth, but rather the imposition of a system of rewards and punishments meted out in accordance with a capricious vision of social utility. Martin begins with the case of Marguerite Steinheil, the wife of an artist of only middling talent. A strikingly beautiful woman, she presided over a famous salon and was the lover of influential politicians. When she was tried for the brutal murders of her husband and her mother, Marguerite defended herself with a flurry of extravagant stories and unlikely counter-accusations. Even so, she was found innocent of all charges, and the crimes were left unsolved. The second trial considered is that of Thérèse Humbert, a young woman who used an apparently innate talent for elaborate deception in rising from poverty to the upper reaches of Parisian society. With the aid of her husband and her brothers, Thérèse created a series of specious lawsuits over an illusory American legacy. Then, playing on the greed of dozens of investors, she skillfully manipulated the French courts to perpetrate a fraud that would last for twenty years, yield millions, and make her salon one of the most dazzling in Europe until the day when the ruse was finally found out. The third case is that of Henriette Caillaux, the wife of an important leader in the Radical party. She admitted shooting Gaston Calmette, the influential newspaper editor who had been carrying out a campaign of vilification against her husband. But when she was tried for the murder in 1914, Henriette was found innocent and allowed to go free. The sensational trials of Marguerit Steinheil, Thérèse Humbert, and Henriette Caillaux mirrored in many the stalemate society of the Belle Epoque itself. By examining the hypocrisy of justice in the Third Republic, Benjamin Martin uncovers the vast extent of that society's corruption, the amorality and sordidness that were cloaked only partially by the mantle of respectability.

Examines the work of post-Civil War southern writers who criticize the myth of the South as pastoral paradise. Sooner or later in all their idealized worlds, the idyllic vision fades in an inescapable moment of awakening. This moment, which is central to MacKethan's study, produces an atmosphere pastoral in mood and implications.

In the autumn of 1857, sustained runs on New York banks led to a panic atmosphere that affected the American economy for the next two years. In The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, James L. Huston presents an exhaustive analysis of the political, social and intellectual repercussions of the Panic and shows how it exacerbated the conflict between North and South.The panic of 1857 initiated a general inquiry between free traders and protectionists into the deficiencies of American economic practices. A key aspect of this debate was the ultimate fate of the American worker, an issue that was given added emphasis by a series of labor demonstrations and strikes. In an attempt to maintain the material welfare of laborers, northerners advocated a program of high tariffs, free western lands, and education. But these proposals elicited the opposition of southerners, who believed that such policies would not serve the needs of the slaves system. Indeed, many people of the period saw the struggle between North and South as an economic one whose outcome would determine whether laborers would be free and well paid or degraded and poor.Politically, the Panic of 1857 resurrected economic issues that had characterized the Whig-Democratic party system prior to the 1850s. Southerners, observing the collapse of northern banks, believed that they could continue to govern the nation by convincing northern propertied interests that sectionalism had to be ended in order to ensure the continued profitability of intersectional trade. In short, they hoped for a marriage between the Yankee capitalist and the southern plantation owner.However, in northen states, the Panic had made the Whig program of high tariffs, a national bank, and internal improvements popular with distressed members of the community. The country's old-line Whigs and nativists were particularly affected by the state of economic affairs. When Republicans moved to adopt a portion of the old Whig program, conservatives found the attraction irresistible. By maintaining their new coalition with conservatives and by exploiting the weaknesses of the Buchanan administration, the Republicans managed to capture the presidency in 1860.No other book examines in such detail the political ramifications of the Panic of 1857. By explaining how the economic depression influenced the course of sectional debate, Huston has made an important and much-needed contribution to Civil War historiography.

The urban growth of Virginia during the decade and a half before the Civil War has been an unjustly neglected subject in American history. With this authoritative book David Goldfield fills a long-standing gap in historical scholarship by providing much new information and a fresh perspective on urban development in the Old Dominion during the turbulent antebellum years. According to Goldfield's interpretation, the urbanization of Virginia was prompted, in part, by the response of the state's leaders to the sectionalism that increasingly influenced prewar southern ideas. Caught up in the intense competition for western trade and commerce, Virginia's urbanizers dreamed of railroads and canals flung across the continent and bringing the wealth of the West into the Old Dominion. To realize these heroic visions, the state's entrepreneurs planned railroad networks, invested in manufacturing, and sought to establish trade with Europe. Lynchburg and Petersburg became centers for tobacco manufacturing, the ports of Alexandria and Norfolk saw a resurgence of shipping activity, and Richmond developed flour-milling and iron-manufacturing industries. Local governments, labor systems, and the cities themselves expanded to accommodate urban growth, embracing the farmer as a partner in the urban economy. Finally, a distinct urban consciousness developed to provide an intellectual framework for the urbanization process. Despite the unprecedented growth of Virginia's cities, however, their dreams of economic independence remained unfulfilled. By 1861 the state was more economically dependent on its northern rivals than it had ever been before. As the state reluctantly seceded from the Union, the subject of urban economic growth elicited sharp debate at the secession convention. Urban Virginia would have to wait until the "New South" years to renew the dreams of economic independence.

I had just come from Mother's room early one morning and was sitting alone on the steps at the front of the building when Bill drove up in his little red station wagon. He approached me and, knowing that any change in Mother could only be for the worse, simply said. "Let's go in and see, Mother." We remained at her bedside for ten or fifteen minutes, then we went back outside and sat down together on the concrete steps. It was a clear fall day and people of the community were going placidly about their affairs; only Mother inside on the hospital bed was motionless, except for her breathing which seemed to become more labored with each passing day. Bill got out his pipe, slowly filled the bowl with the special tobacco which was blended for him in London, and fished a big kitchen match from a pocket of his ancient hunting jacket. Then, with unlit pipe in one hand and unstruck match in the other, he gazed out at the unhurried traffic anti asked me what my thoughts were on the hereafter. I carefully explained them as best I could, and when I had finished he struck the match on the concrete and applied the swelling flame to his pipe. It didn't catch very well, and I remember he took the pipe from his mouth anti gently tapped the bowl on the step: then. brazing again across the now empty street, he said. "Maybe each of us will become some sort of radio wave."

A decade and more has passed since the first publication of Still Rebels, Still Yankees. During that time the book has become recognised as a classic affirmation of the necessity of tradition in conserving cultural order.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even the past," William Faulker wrote.The Southern Reporter constitutes a report on the collisions between a present that cannot find its voice and a past that reaches out incessantly into the lives of contemporary men and women.An old Louisiana lawyer finds himself in California seeking a missing heir who is a physicist, musician, doctor, theologian-and a leader of a crazed and murderous santanistic cult.A childless retired couple prepares treats for Halloween's children-only to find that the "children" have taken on the character of their terrifying costumes.An elderly lawyer, dying of cancer, is forced to recall an even greater pain and finds his own kind of salvation in the remembrance of love.A court reporter, who has spent his life recording the crimes and affairs of others, at last cannot stand the flood of evil and visits his own justice on a man the jury has found innocent of rape.A young boy is caught between his high-spirited, hell-raising uncle and the deadly civilizing force of his mother.The Southern Reporter penetrates the façade of contemporary life, looking for its roots in the past -- not simply the past of its people but the looming imaginary structure of western history, against which all of us lead our lives -- and die our deaths. The search for images of order and the loss of them constitute the meaning of The Southern Reporter.

The New Orleans writer Grace King was an intensely loyal daughter of the South. Fostered by bitter memories of the Civil War, her loyalty was kept burning by her family's struggle to regain its wealth and maintain its social position. In this volume, Robert Bush discusses King's life and her art.

Over the years, the phrase "southern oratory" has become laden with myth; its mere invocation conjures up powerful images of grandiloquent antebellum patriarchs, enthusiastic New South hucksters, and raving wild-eyed demagogue politicians. In these essays, Waldo Braden strips away the myths to expose how the South's orators achieved their rhetorical effects and manipulated their audiences. The Oral Tradition in the South begins with two essays that trace the roots of the South's particular identification with oratory. In "The Emergence of the Concept of Southern Oratory, 1850-1950," Braden suggests that it was through the influence of southern scholars that southern oratory gained its renown. The second essay, "The Oral Tradition in the Old South," focuses on antebellum times to reveal the several factors that combined to make the region a fertile ground for oratory. Braden further explores the antebellum oratorical tradition in "The 1860 Election Campaign in Western Tennessee," analyzing speeches made in Memphis by such national figures as William L. Yancey, Andrew Johnson, and Stephen A. Douglas, and revealing the nature of political canvassing in that era. Shifting his discussion to the years that followed the Civil War, Braden examines. in "Myths in a Rhetorical Context," how such speakers as General John B. Gordon and Henry Grady worked to restore the shattered self-esteem of the region by spinning myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause and by proclaiming the hopeful era of the New South. The fifth essay, "The Rhetoric of Exploitation," probes the rhetorical strategies of the demagogue politicians of the twentieth century-strategies such as "plain folks" appeals and race-baiting. In the final essay, "The Rhetoric of a Closed Society." Braden analyzes the movement opposing racial integration in Mississippi. Showing how the White Citizens' Council, Governor Ross Barnett, and other leaders manipulated the public to make the state a closed society from 1954 to 1964. Although he takes pains to establish the historical context in each of these essays, Braden's emphasis as a rhetorical critic is always on the speeches themselves. He pays close attention to the kinds of appeals found in the words of the speeches and to the individual speaker's use of images and phrases to evoke particular myths. But Braden looks beyond the texts of the speeches to take into account the full context of the event. "What the reader finds in the printed version of the text," he explains, "might be only a small part of the myth, a tiny hint of what grinds inside frustrated listeners. Sometimes the trigger for the myth does not even appear in the printed version, because face-to-face the listeners and the speaker, feeling a oneness, evoke the myth without verbal expression." To account for this nonverbal dimension of oratory, these essays assess the impact of the location and atmosphere of the gathering, the audience's expectations, and the speaker's use of ritual, symbolic gestures, and props. During the nearly forty years of his career, Waldo Braden has been a pioneer in the serious study of oratory. A landmark work, The Oral Tradition in the South is the capstone to a distinguished career, a comprehensive and authoritative study of the subject Braden has so innovatively researched.

Considers the influence of English political, social, and theatrical history on the depiction of black characters on the English stage from 1589 to 1695. Anthony Barthelemy shows that almost without exception blackness was associated with treachery, evil, and ugliness.

Offers a concise historical survey of the methods by which the United States government has sought to organise military forces from the days of the Revolutionary War to the Atomic Age. T. Harry Williams demonstrates that the American genius - even the genius for making mistakes - has found full expression in the systems which have been formulated.

When she was forty-four years old, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop left her comfortable home in New London, Connecticut, and soon thereafter took an apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She ran a newspaper ad inviting indigents dying of cancer to come live with her to be cared for until their death. The journey that led this daughter of one of America's most prominent literary figures to that Lower East Side tenement is the subject of this fascinating and far-reaching biography by Patricia Dunlavy Valenti. Rose was born in 1851, the youngest child of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. As an adult, she reflected upon a childhood that "made me seem to myself a stranger who had come too late." Indeed, throughout much of her life, Rose found her own sense of identity subsumed by the demands and needs of those closest to her. She was overshadowed not only by her famous father but also by her brother, Julian, who achieved a modest degree of literary fame in his own right, and by her sister, Una, whose fragile health was a constant source of concern to her family. In 1871, Rose married George Parsons Lathrop, who would become a writer and an editor of her father's works. Rose herself had begun to write fiction and poetry at an early age, and after the death of their only child in 1881, she saw the publication of much of her work. Valenti reads these stories and poems with a biographer's eye and finds them filled with clues pointing to the remarkable transformation that would allow their author to transcend Victorian constraints and claim the kind of life that would realize her singular gifts. Particularly illuminating are the works Rose completed during the years in which she was making a break from her husband, whom she left in 1896. After her final separation from her husband, Rose, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1891, devoted the remainder of her life to the work carried on to this day by the order of nuns she founded, the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. The account of her ministry, begun when cancer was thought contagious, should establish Rose Hawthorne Lathrop as a visionary in her belief that everyone has a right to die with dignity and as a pioneer in her advocacy of compassionate methods of caring for those near death. Valenti's well-written and thoroughly researched biography will interest a wide audience, from those who would enjoy a lively glimpse of the Hawthorne household to those concerned with the documenting of women's contributions to society.

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.

Opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable "female consciousness" in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, it departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren.

One of America's more perceptive younger critics, Louis Rubin is well known for his commentaries on the literature of the South. These essays - selected from his critical works over a period of more than a dozen years - reflect his wider concern with the whole spectrum of American literature.

David Boyd's biography is the story of one man's dedicated struggle to protect and preserve Louisiana's fledgling state university from the cumulative effects of war, Reconstruction, political hostility, and parochial greed. Boyd fought hard to promote his vision of higher education among a largely antagonistic or apathetic citizenry.

Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith, Keiran Quinlan offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject.

Focuses on four representative poets - Louise Bogan, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Adrienne Rich - to explore the ways in which women writers' treatment of isolation extends our perception of women's experience and our understanding of the alienated human sensibility.

Offers the first full-scale biography of a man of meager education and limited political experience who worked his way from the North Georgia mountains to the positions of governor and US senator. Drawing on previously unavailable documents, Parks captures the mood of Georgia as well as the personality of this astute and controversial politician.

Albion Tourgee published a succession of novels and stories which made him famous. Bricks Without Straw, one of his two best-selling novels, is not only a moving story but an important commentary on the Reconstruction process in the South. In his introduction, Profession Otto H. Olsen gives a comprehensive evaluation of the book and its author.

Ines Murat's readable and entertaining narrative introduces us to little-known facts about the adventures and misadventures of numerous French veterans of Waterloo who migrated to the United States. More often than not, their visions of life in America conflicted with the original New World dream of the peaceful pioneer.

The first comprehensive survey of the Marquis de Lafayette as a symbolic figure in American intellectual history, this book examines the compound image of the man and the ideas he represented.

Joy J. Jackson's Where the River Runs Deep tells two stories--both significant and both fascinating. It is a biography of the author's father, Oliver Jackson, who spent virtually his entire life on or near the Mississippi River. And it is a history of the river itself, and the many changes that have transformed it in the twentieth century. Born in an oysterman's camp in south Louisiana, only a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and raised in an orphanage in New Orleans, Oliver Jackson (1896-1985) grew up to become a pilot boat crew member, a merchant seaman, a tugboat-man, and ultimately a Mississippi River pilot, the profession to which he had always aspired. Drawing extensively on oral history, including a series of audiotapes her father recorded before his death, Jackson presents a detailed social history not only of her father and his forebears but of a way of life now past. She vividly portrays village life in once-thriving but now-vanished river communities such as Port Eads and Burrwood in the delta below New Orleans, and in such working-class areas of the city as the Irish Channel. And she provides detailed descriptions of the early days of riverboat piloting between New Orleans and Baton Rouge and of tugboat work in the New Orleans harbor. Throughout, she evokes the special passion and respect that pilots have always had for their work and the river. Woven into Jackson's narrative of her father's life and career is a history of the profound changes in life and commerce on the Mississippi River since the turn of the century. During Oliver Jackson's lifetime, cotton gave way to petroleum as the major product transported on the lower Mississippi, while steamboats faded away and were replaced by towboats, with their long lines of barges. After mid-century many of the plantations and rural homesteads that had lined the banks of the river since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were crowded by the increasing presence of petrochemical plants. Jackson also writes about such calamitous events as the hurricane of 1915 and the great flood of 1927, and she describes the menace of German submarines at the mouth of the Mississippi during America's early months in World War II. Where the River Runs Deep is a story of river life unlike any other. It will appeal to students of regional history and family history, as well as to anyone fascinated by the lore of the Mississippi.

These stories deal with the clash between old and new values, with ties to the land and the lure of the sea, with the struggle to maintain relationships- between parents and children, husbands and wives, community and individual.

William Faulkner was one of the few major writers of the period following World War I to retain a sense of the place of abstractions in life and in art. Faulkner saw life as a process of flux and change and abstractions as a means of either denying actuality or of coping with change and providing a solid touchstone in the flux. William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual is the first critical study of Faulkner to examine in depth the theme of evasion and distortion of existence through abstractions--a theme that can be found to a greater or lesser degree in every Faulkner novel. The book covers the entire seventeen-novel canon and includes discussions of a significant number of short stories. Its thematic organization points out the unity and continuity of Faulkner's work. Examining the interrelationships between Faulkner's fiction and modern thinking, Panthea Broughton shows the insight Faulkner had into the philosophical problem of the abstract versus the actual. She concludes that the central dilemma in Faulkner's fiction--resistance to flux or change--is also one of the salient problems of the modern world.

Writing from a conviction of the centrality and worth of Walker Percy's work, as well as from the idea that fresh criticism is of value not only to readers but to living authors as well, the essayists in this collection present diverse approaches to understanding his art.

In this critical study of Theodore Roethke's poetry, Peter Balakian treats the evolution of the poet's work from his first book, Open House (1941), to his last, The Far Field (1964). Balakian argues that Roethke was among the most innovative poets of his time and that The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) brought America to a new frontier in the contemporary era. Balakian maintains that Roethke combined and furthered major traditions in English and American poetry -- the formal poetics and meditative sensibility of British metaphysical and Romantic poetry, the American visionary tradition, and the innovations of modernism.The early chapters of the book explore Roethke's intellectual, religious, nd psychological development and his development as a poet. Balakian discusses the influence of William Carlos Williams on Roethke's work and claims that the relationship between the two poets provided Roethke with a sense of the American grain. Later chapters treat the shift from self-absorption to union with otherness that marks Roethke's love poems, exploring the poet's development of mysticism and a poetic persona and examining the influences of Eliot and Whitman on his work. Balakian also discusses the metaphysical language necessary for Roethke's late poems and follows Roethke's spiritual progress as he prophetically faces his final work.In presenting the evolution of Roethke's career, Balakian offers fresh and original readings of the poetry. He avoids any monolithic approach to the body of Roethke's work, employing instead various approaches to Roethke's stages of poetic evolution. Balakian makes use of the psychology of C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann, the writings of the mystics, the aesthetics of William Carlos Williams, and the myth of the American frontier. With a literary historian's concern for Roethke's place in history and a critic's eye for the sources and structures of poetry, Balakian studies the resonances of language and the inner life of this poet's craft. Theodore Roethke's Far Fields places Roethke firmly in literary and intellectual history and asserts his place as a major poet.

Examines the case of six men of Italian descent who were charged with the murder of a businessman in 1921 in Independence, Louisiana, and ultimately hanged.