Bøker utgitt av Louisiana State University Press

"In 2018, while teaching her kids to swim and working on urban river restoration projects, Hannah S. Palmer began a journal of social encounters with water. As she found herself dangling her feet in a seemingly all-white swimming pool, she started to worry about how her young sons would learn to swim. Would they grow up accustomed to the stubbornly segregated pools of Atlanta? Was it safe for them to wade in creeks laced with urban runoff or dive into the ever-warming, man-made swimming holes of the South? Should they just join the Y? But these weren't just parenting questions. In the South, how we swim-and whether we have access to water at all-is tied up in race and class. As she took her sons pool-hopping across Atlanta, Palmer found an intimate lens through which to view the city's neighborhoods. In The Pool Is Closed, she documents the creeks behind fences, the springs in the sewers, the lakes that had all but vanished since her own parents learned to swim. In the process, she uncovers complex stories about environmental history, water policy, and the racial politics of public spaces. Nothing prepared Palmer for the contamination, sewage, and bodies that appear when you look at water too long. Her search for water became compulsive, a way to make sense of the world. The Pool Is Closed is a book about water: where it flows and where it floods, who owns it, and what it costs. It's also a story about embracing parenthood in a time of environmental catastrophe and political anxiety, of dwindling public space and natural resources. It chronicles a year-long quest to find a place to swim and finding, instead, what makes shared water so threatening and wild"--

"Historiography in all fields of southern history is vibrant yet missing abundant scholarship that unites the disparate threads of the region's history. A prime example of this trend is that historians studying slavery generally only examine the Old South, whereas civil rights scholars exclusively explore the modern South. Overall, historians make little effort to fuse these focused studies into the contextual swirl of events that either preceded or followed the topics they address. With but few exceptions, these two eras in the region's history are inherently linked but invariably treated as discreet entities in the literature. Bucking this trend, Michael Perman's Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South (2012) offers a sweeping synthesis that underscores the presence of common threads that unite different eras of the region's political history, including the one-party and filibuster traditions. Pursuit of Unity adopts a broad thematic assessment of southern politics that engagingly weaves together the Old and New Souths. Keith Finley's "From Slavery to Segregation" adopts Perman's sweeping scope but focuses on white southern identity over the expanse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as explained in the region's pro-slavery and pro-segregation arguments. Finley treats the South's two racial systems as part of the same whole rather than discrete developments rooted in different periods. He highlights the most salient and oft-repeated themes used in defense of the South's two principal racial regimes. To the non-academic audience, his work provides a broad overview of southern racial and political thought, revealing the larger American struggle with racial injustice, which, although most pronounced in the South, impacted the entire nation. The South's defense of its first racial system of slavery became a natural model for the defense of its second, segregation. According to Finley, a comparative analysis of the rhetoric employed in defense of both racial institutions reveals elements of continuity and change in the region's identity. Ultimately, he suggests that the history of the twentieth-century South is irreparably linked to the century before it. The Old South and the New South shared a similar constellation of ideas that informed arguments defending their respective race-based orders, both of which took the form of a commonality of perception among white residents regarding race, a sense of being assailed by outsiders, and a series of appeals to the highest secular authority in the pantheon of regional, and American, beliefs-the Constitution. Finley's masterful synthesis of the rhetoric employed in defense of slavery and segregation reveals the intellectual shackles that once bound the region and must never be permitted to return. His study, the first to offer a detailed analysis of the intellectual traditions that buttressed the South's racial orders over the past three centuries, will be welcomed by southerners and Americans grappling with the South's racial inheritance"--

"Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853-1920, is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the institution in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using the Old St. Louis Workhouse as a representative example, award-winning historian Gregg Andrews brings to life individual stories of men and women sentenced to this debtors' prison to break rocks in the quarry, sew clothing, scrub cell floors and walls, or toil in its brush factory. Most inmates, too poor to pay requisite fines, came through the city's police courts on charges of vagrancy, drunkenness, disturbing the peace, or violating some other ordinance. The penal system criminalized everything from poverty and unemployment to homelessness and the mere fact of being Black. Workhouses proved overcrowded and inhospitable facilities that housed hardcore felons and young street toughs along with prostitutes, petty thieves, peace disturbers, political dissenters, "levee rats," adulterers, and those who suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. Officials even funneled the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the physically infirm into the workhouse system. The torture of prisoners in the hellish chambers of the St. Louis Workhouse proved far worse than Charles Dickens's portrayals of cruelty in the debtors' prisons of Victorian England. The ordinance that created the St. Louis complex in 1843 banned corporal punishment, but shackles, chains, and the whipping post remained central to the institution's attempts to impose discipline. Officers also banished more recalcitrant inmates to solitary confinement in the "bull pen," where they subsisted on little more than bread and water. Andrews traces efforts by critics to reform the workhouse, a political plum in the game of petty ward patronage played by corrupt and capricious judges, jailers, and guards. The best opportunity for lasting change came during the Progressive Era, but the limited contours of progressivism in St. Louis thwarted reformers' efforts. The defeat of a municipal bond issue in 1920 effectively ended plans to replace the urban industrial workhouse model with a more humane municipal farm system championed by Progressives"--

"Timothy Messer-Kruse's study boldly argues that a critical factor in the convening of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was white American fury at the British evacuation of enslaved Black Americans at the end of the Revolutionary War. Historians have well documented that after Virginia's royal governor-Lord Dunmore-offered freedom to enslaved persons in exchange for their service to the Crown in 1775, the British provided encouragement and sanctuary to them throughout the Revolutionary War. In the conflict's last years, British forces evacuated many such fugitives from Charleston and Savannah. They also gathered thousands of runaways in their last stronghold in New York City. Once the war ended, the American Continental Congress issued orders to its diplomats negotiating peace terms to demand the return of these "fugitives." As a result, in the Treaty of Paris, the British agreed not to remove any enslaved Americans. Nevertheless, as Messer-Kruse shows, when the British finally quit Manhattan, they transported with them thousands of fugitives from American slavery. Several states immediately passed laws to pressure the United Kingdom to return them by seizing Loyalist property and canceling debts to English merchants. Soon, it became apparent to patriot leaders that such state actions imperiled the peace, American trade, and the future of the West. Unlike other crises in this so-called "crucial era," there was no route for Congress to resolve state violations of a duly ratified international treaty under the Articles of Confederation. This impasse pushed key national leaders to embrace the call for a complete restructuring of the fundamental charter of government. However, even after states ratified the Constitution, the issue of the "carried-off" resonated through American society and animated such pivotal events as the Jay Treaty Controversy of 1795-1796 that bred the first formal political parties. Surprisingly, no other books link the issue of British protection of the formerly enslaved and the road to the United States Constitution. Though many historians have documented the salience of slavery in the drafting of the Constitution, none have explicitly linked it to the events leading to the Convention. Instead, the story of the determined efforts of patriot leaders to recapture formerly enslaved persons, even at the risk of renewed war and international isolation, seems to have been systematically silenced. Messer-Kruse's study is thus a novel and paradigm-shifting interpretation of America's origins that should attract much academic and popular attention"--

Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra, Holly Grout uses the theater--specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker--to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra--an ancient, mythologized queen--the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood? In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra's eroticized image--as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment--resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine's mass manufacture of "stars." At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II. Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood.

"A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it," contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca's duende, Nabokov's poshlost, Bash¿'s underglimmer, Huizinga's ludic, Tarkovsky's Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes--first always sharing his own personal life stories--on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree's For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father's death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.

On the Overnight Train collects a lifetime of thought and writing by Alice Friman, presenting poems of passion and permission, gravity and humor, alongside a great deal of truth telling peppered with the salt of invention. Here even the dead clink glasses and remain as alive and present as ever. Here the old stories abide and the new ones, written at the tail end of a life, face the inevitable with clear-eyed candor, wit, and grace. As Stephen Corey writes in his introduction, "Friman's poetry is still kicking ass and breaking hearts as she steams toward ninety," and On the Overnight Train captures the world of a distinctive poet whose work is vivid, understandable, and emotionally honest.

How to Drown a Boy, a debut collection of poems by J. Bruce Fuller, investigates how boyhood and fatherhood entwine to create cycles that mimic decaying and dangerous natural surroundings. The woods, the water, the oil rigs, and the men who work them all have a powerful effect on the speaker from childhood through adulthood. These poems examine the weight of family and culture against a backdrop of climate change and environmental disaster

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions. Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Equal parts elegy and ode, Newly Not Eternal explores the startling suffering and sentiment implicit in human mortality. At the heart of this collection, a son has died on the cusp of his first breath, but the book's stakes are larger and more universal than a single, silent, foreshortened life. Ranging from personal lyrics to monologues in persona, from triolets to a modified crown of sonnets, from surreal fantasy to natural landscape, George David Clark's poems sing of the brutality of time and the beauty that transcends it.

Could the shlock-rock '70s band Kiss in any way affect the outcome of a death-dealing twenty-first-century virus? Is Bob Ross--that permed, inimitable painter of Edenic nostalgia on PBS--actually an emissary from the land of personal loss? Might the work of Edward Hopper reflect facets of a global plague? What is the grammar, finally, of grief, of isolation? The essays in Chad Davidson's Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author's father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father's death--another plague visited on the author--found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief. Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson's father to the growing list of loved ones lost in--and, in this case, right before--the pandemic. It's a personal memorial, given over to a father's memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.

Mom in Space is a complicated love letter to both the intergalactic and the terrestrial. Using the lens of spaceflight, Lisa Ampleman explores subjects ranging from the personal to the political, from fertility tests and parenting to climate change and civil rights.As NASA and commercial space companies gear up for Artemis missions to the moon, Mom in Space offers new conceptions of women in space, incorporating both fictional and real female astronauts, among them the first mom in space (Anna Fisher) and the first Black woman in space (Mae Jemison). With a sense of both awe and informed inquiry, Mom in Space considers what spaceflight means not just for those who get rocketed into space but for those who stay home.

Military uniforms, badges, flags, and other material objects have been used to represent the identity of Americans throughout history. In The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox examines the material culture of America's bloodiest conflict, offering a deeper understanding of the war and its commemoration. Cox's analysis traces the influence of sewn materials throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction as markers of power and authority for both the Union and the Confederacy. These textiles became cherished objects by the turn of the century, a transition seen in veterans replacing wartime uniforms with new commemorative attire and repatriating Confederate battle flags. Looking specifically at the creation of material culture by various commemoration groups, including the Grand Army of the Republic, the Woman's Relief Corps, the United Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Cox reveals the ways that American society largely accepted their messages, furthering the mission of their memory work. Through the lens of material culture, Cox sheds new light on a variety of Civil War topics, including preparation for war, nuances in relationships between Native American and African American soldiers, the roles of women, and the rise of postwar memorial societies.

From discursive essay-poems to tightly constructed lyrics, Ed Falco's X in the Tickseed examines a world that reveals itself through its mysteries, reflecting upon the ephemeral nature of all things. In the series of poems that bookend the collection, a speaker identified only as X reviews personal history and relationships, speculating, pondering, and questioning in the face of a baffling universe. Peppered between the X poems, artists as varied as Artemisia Gentileschi, Frank O'Connor, and Nick Cave surface, usually in poems posing as essays about their art. Other poems range from explorations of cultural perspective, as in "A Few Words to a Young American Killed in the Tet Offensive," where a war resister addresses a young man of his generation who died in Vietnam, to the often playful "An Alphabet of Things." Throughout, Falco's poems speculate on matters of life and faith, intensified by an awareness of death.

Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli's Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters' backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers' imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln's life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln's legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president. Wetta and Novelli's work is the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln's life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film.

The Union Generals Speak is the first annotated edition of the 1864 congressional investigation into Major General George Gordon Meade's conduct during the Gettysburg campaign. The transcripts alone, which present eyewitness accounts from sixteen participant officers at Gettysburg, offer a wealth of information about the what and the why of one of the most pivotal battles in American history; but it is the addition of contextual comments and background material by Bill Hyde that unleashes this virtually untapped resource for readers. Laden with ulterior motives, prejudices, faulty recollection, and outright lies, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War's report is a minefield of inaccuracies. Hyde's comprehensive analysis, informed by recent scholarship, transforms it into an accessible, rewarding aid for students of the Gettysburg chapter in the Civil War. In the course of the volume, Hyde gives thorough examination to the origins and purpose of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, the political climate and military thinking in Washington at the time of the Meade hearings, and the hidden agendas of the witnesses and seven committee members. He maintains that the JCCW's dissatisfaction with Meade went much deeper than disapproval of the general's hesitancy to pursue and cripple Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on July 4, 1863--a failure that disappointed every northern citizen from Lincoln to the ordinary soldier. The bipartisan body of mostly radical Republicans who favored a ruthless defeat of the South aimed, Hyde shows, to restore power to the committee's favorite, Major General Joseph Hooker, whom Meade had succeeded as commander of the Army of the Potomac only three days before Gettysburg. The unfolding of the Gettysburg campaign, the career of General Meade, and the North's highly politicized method of warmaking all receive new illumination in The Union General's Speak. Hyde's balanced critique of this important primary source reminds us that though Meade is remembered now mainly for his role in defeating the Confederates at Gettysburg, the JCCW hearings confirmed that he was not the leader to win the war.

As Spain and England vied for dominance of the Atlantic world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mounting political and religious tensions between the two empires raised a troubling specter for contemporary British writers attempting to justify early English imperial efforts. Specifically, these writers focused on encounters with black Africans throughout the Atlantic world, attempting to use these points of contact to articulate and defend England's global ambitions. In Black Africans in the British Imagination, Cassander L. Smith investigates how the physical presence of black Africans both enabled and disrupted English literary responses to Spanish imperialism. By examining the extent to which this population helped to shape early English narratives, from political pamphlets to travelogues, Smith offers new perspectives on the literary, social, and political impact of black Africans in the early Atlantic world. With detailed analysis of the earliest English-language accounts from the Atlantic world, including writings by Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Richard Ligon, Smith approaches contact narratives from the perspective of black Africans, recovering figures often relegated to the margins. This interdisciplinary study explores understandings of race and cross-cultural interaction and revises notions of whiteness, blackness, and indigeneity. Smith reveals the extent to which contact with black Africans impeded English efforts to stigmatize the Spanish empire as villainous and to malign Spain's administration of its colonies. In addition, her study illustrates how black presences influenced the narrative choices of European (and later Euro-American) writers, providing a more nuanced understanding of black Africans' role in contemporary literary productions of the region.

Seventeen years after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, one final, dramatic confrontation occurred between the Lee family and the United States government. In The Last Battle of the Civil War, Anthony J. Gaughan recounts the fascinating saga of United States v. Lee, known to history as the "Arlington Case." Prior to the Civil War, Mary Lee, Robert E. Lee's wife, owned the estate that Arlington National Cemetery rests on today. After the attack on Fort Sumter, however, the Union army seized the Lees' Arlington home and converted it into a national cemetery as well as a refugee camp for runaway slaves. In 1877 George Washington Custis Lee, Robert and Mary's eldest son, filed suit demanding that the federal government pay the Lees just compensation for Arlington. In response, the Justice Department asserted that sovereign immunity barred Lee and all other private plaintiffs from bringing Fifth Amendment takings cases. The courts, the government claimed, had no jurisdiction to hear such lawsuits. In a historic ruling, the Supreme Court rejected the government's argument. As the majority opinion explained, "All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law and are bound to obey it." The ruling made clear that the government was legally obligated by the Fifth Amendment to pay just compensation to the Lees. The Court's ruling in United States v. Lee affirmed the principle that the rule of law applies equally to ordinary citizens and high government officials. As the justices emphasized, the Constitution is not suspended in wartime and government officials who violate the law are not beyond the reach of justice. Ironically, the case also represented a watershed on the path of sectional reconciliation. By ruling in favor of the Lee family, the justices demonstrated that former Confederates would receive a fair hearing in the federal courts. Gaughan provides a riveting account of the Civil War's final battle, a struggle whose outcome became a significant step on the path to national reunion.

Gathers one hundred poems by Henry Taylor, drawing on over fifty years of published work by this witty, adept, and vital literary voice. The book opens with twenty-five recent poems collected for the first time. The remaining seventy-five poems appear from his previous books.

An underlying cynicism lies at the heart of the questions asked by Chelsea Dingman's I, Divided: What is a life worth? Today. Now. Why is that? Who gives anyone permission to be? And how is that determined? In poems that use the science behind chaos theory as a lens for examining illness and agency, Dingman explores the divide between determination and accident, whereby the body becomes a site of exploration as well as elegy in cases of disease such as traumatic brain injury, cancer, and addiction. Much like weather patterns, inherited histories of violence and disease are cyclical. They remain at once determined and yet undetermined, becoming ultimately chaotic. The "I" of the title is fractured over several divides, subordinated to illness and to a past that is invariable, though finally morphs as an agent of change. I, Divided operates as if within a swirling hurricane, beginning and ending amid the same human concerns, tracing a life cycle and its repetition.

The Professor of Forgetting, a new collection from the acclaimed Irish poet Greg Delanty, swings back and forth on the fulcrum of what we call "now" and confronts our notion of how time passes. From the very first poem, "Going Nowhere Fast," which ponders whether we are now here or going nowhere, to the final selection, from which the book takes its self-reflective title, these exuberant poems chronicle what it means to be human with joy, pathos, honesty, despair, sorrow, celebration, and wit. Structurally diverse in form, the poems also explore a range of poignant topics, including childhood, family, love, racism, the natural world, immigration, and the unavoidability of death. Often humorous, Delanty's poetry finds ways of coping with the challenges of life, as it makes lasting art out of heartbreaking difficulty and experience.

Alabama focuses on a boy from a rural, fundamentalist community who becomes a pacifist, feminist, and existentialist poet. Labyrinth, meditation, fable, and peasant poem, formed from interleaved strands of prose vignettes and lineated poetry, this collection is at once a tale of cultural exile and familial loyalty, and an unflinching look at regional shame that doubles as a love story, all expressed with the intimate voice and vision of Rodney Jones.