Bücher veröffentlicht von Louisiana State University Press

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: "Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community." Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt's most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of "bright mulatto" caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage. Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation's moral progress. Andrews argues that "along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history." Although Chesnutt's career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America's race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will. William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author's times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt's works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.

This biography offers a portrait of the enigmatic leader Franz Sigel. It shows him to be a disciplined, self-sacrificing idealist who sparked pride among his fellow emigres, aroused controversy among Americans, and perhaps enjoyed more admiration than other Civil War figures.

Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod.

Theodore Bilbo is remembered almost exclusively as the Archangel of white Supremacy. His reputation as perhaps the vilest purveyor of racist rhetoric is richly deserved. Yet, as Chester Morgan demonstrates in Redneck Liberal, the conventional image of Bilbo as merely a racist demagogue paints only half the picture.

Gathers together, evaluates, and sets down the stories, legends, facts, and circumstances of the founding of Baton Rouge; its troubled history under the colonial governments of France, England, and Spain; and its eventual entry into the Union in 1812.

At the close of the Civil War, the Federal government undertook a sweeping reform of land tenure in the South with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Michael Lanza studies the conception, evolution, and demise of this critical aspect of Reconstruction history.

Traditionally, the secession of the states in the lower South has been viewed as an irrational response to Lincoln's election or as a rational response to the genuine threat a Republican president posed to the geographical expansion of slavery. Both views emphasize the fundamental importance of relations between the federal government and the southern states, but overlook the degree to which secession was a response to a crisis within the South.Johnson argues that secession was a double revolution -- for home rule and for those who ruled at home -- brought about by an internal crisis in southern society. He portrays secession as the culmination of the long-developing tension between slavery on one side and the institutional and ideological consequences of the American Revolution on the other. This tension was masked during the antebellum years by the conflicting social, political, sectional, and national loyalties of many southerners. Lincoln's election forced southerners to choose among their loyalties, and their choice revealed a South that was divided along lines coinciding roughly with an interest in slavery and the established order.Starting with a thorough analysis of election data and integrating quantitative with more traditional literary sources, Johnson goes beyond the act of secession itself to examine what the secessionists said and did after they left the Union. Although this book is a close study of secession in Georgia, it has implications for the rest of the lower South. The result is a new thesis that presents secession as the response to a more complex set of motivations than has been recognized.

Elite, personable, and persuasive, Edward Douglass White served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, he significantly influenced American public law. Robert Highsaw' s extensive judicial biography stresses White's constitutional thought and philosophy.

Because of the legendary exploits of Sir Francis Drake, most people have heard of the sixteenth-century conflicts between the English and the Spanish in the New World. Paul Hoffman looks behind the legend to discover the reality of what the Spanish crown was doing to defend its empire against raiders such as Drake. Using quantitative as well as literary data on the costs, types, and locations of defenses and on the locations and types of corsair incidents, Hoffman documents the evolution of s system of defenses that he believes was adequate for confronting the violence of the French and English in the years before 1586. He suggests that the size of Drake's expedition of 1586 was a response to this system and in turn caused the Spanish to abandon the system in favor of one that concentrated on the defense of the major towns and trade routes. Besides telling the complex story of how the Spanish built forts, installed garrisons and artillery, and patrolled the Caribbean, Hoffman discusses the ways in which the political system of the empire shaped decisions on defenses. Contrary to what many have believed, Hoffman concludes, Spain exhibited neither military failure nor timidity in its defense of hits interest in the New World. Sharing the results of his meticulous research about the Spanish Caribbean, Paul Hoffman examines an important period that legend has obscured.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.

Examining his frequently overlooked successes, as well as his failures, Hargrove analyses both the content and the methods of Jimmy Carter's policy leadership. His style of leadership is studied in the light of his beliefs and values, and of his problem-solving skills and experience.

History is often measured by records of great leaders and events. Nicholas Hardeman convinces us that American history can be measured but the shaping force of a quiet monarch - corn. Hardeman enthusiastically demonstrates that in order to understand the settling and development of America we must know about corn and its influence.

Tracing the development of a black community in the trans-Mississippi West, Thomas Cox probes the political, social, and economic standing of blacks and the growth of black institutions in the Topeka area from early settlement during the territorial period through the rise of an urban Topeka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this overview, a noted authority takes a perceptive look at the radical trends in modern drama and provides us with a new awareness of the forces and ideas behind the current theatrical battle.

Following the dizzying course of Stephen Sayre's career, this biography reveals a vast panorama of life, both high and low, in the era of the American Revolution.

Chatham Roberdeau Wheat has rightly been called the grandest of Civil War heroes. Born a Virginia gentleman, this handsome giant was by turns lawyer, politician, filibusterer, wit, bon vivant, and soldier of fortune. In this comprehensive biography, originally published in 1957, Charles Dufour details Wheat's life and loves.

Alice Fulton, the judge for the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, calls Once I Gazed at You in Wonder "quite simply, the most endearing book I've read in some time." Readers of this audacious and, yes, endearing collection will agree.

In Pistols and Politics, Samuel Hyde gives serious scrutiny to a region heretofore largely neglected by historians, integrating the anomalies of one area of Louisiana into the history of the state and the wider South.

In this study of the communities on both sides of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina, J. William Harris explores two great ironies of American history, the South's commitment to a liberty supported by slavery and its attempt to maintain the status quo with a war that undermined southern society.

Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities.

Until relatively recently, a legacy of silence restricted historical writing on the Great Hanging. In the first systematic treatment of this important event, Richard McCaslin also sheds much light on the tensions produced in southern society by the Civil War, the nature of disaffection in the Confederacy, and the American vigilante tradition.

Like the feast day recalled in its title, this collection of twenty poems venerates the dead. Brenda Marie Osbey invokes, impersonates, and converses with her Afro-New Orleans forebears, both blood ancestors and spiritual predecessors, weaving in hypnotic cadence a spell as potent as the religious and magical mysteries of her native culture.

In this groundbreaking study, Charles Ramsdell explores the causes of the South's defeat in the Civil War. Finding traditional military explanations insufficient, he argues that deficiencies on the homefront were fundamental to the collapse of the Confederacy.

Originally published in 1952 and long out of print, South of Freedom is a first-rate account of what it was like to live as a second-class citizen, to experience the segregation, humiliation, danger, stereotypes, economic exploitation, and taboos that were all part of life for African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.

By turns elegiac and eccentric, inscribing the South's hallmarks of defeat and refuge in a group of people as intense and adrift as one could encounter, Lives of the Saints is the debut novel that marked Nancy Lemann as a rising literary star.

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaohis a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss, loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself.

In a collection that represents over thirty-five years of her writing life, this distinguished poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language.

In this highly acclaimed and enduring biography, John Alden traces the interwoven histories of George Washington and the nation he helped to create, defend, and guide toward the future. Alden revisits the major events of Washington's personal and professional life, but the core of the biography concerns Washington's leadership roles.

Originally published in 1875, George Cary Eggleston's memoir, which proved immensely popular among readers throughout the country, is a nostalgic, often amusing collection of essays based on the author's Civil War experiences.

Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, this poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson's nephew.