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"Cassander L. Smith's Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term "respectability politics" refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to combat negative stereotypes about their subject group and gain cultural visibility. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behavior of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, or celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of this complicated relationship between race and respectability, Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with respectability politics from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns for Black African character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of early Black Atlantic cultures, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries"--

"Marlene Trestman's Most Fortunate Unfortunates is the first comprehensive history of the Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans. Founded in 1855 in the aftermath of a yellow fever epidemic, the home was the first purpose-built Jewish orphanage in the nation. It reflected the city's affinity for religiously operated orphanages and the growing prosperity of its Jewish community. In 1904, the orphanage founded the Isidore Newman School, a coed, non-sectarian school that was also open to children, regardless of religion, whose parents paid tuition. By the time the Jewish Orphans' Home closed in 1946, it had sheltered over sixteen hundred parentless children and two dozen widows from the Crescent City, Louisiana, and the mid-South. Based on deep archival research and numerous interviews of home alumni and their descendants, Most Fortunate Unfortunates provides a view of life in the home for the children and women who lived there. The study also traces the forces that impelled the home's founders and leaders - both the heralded men and otherwise overlooked women - to create and maintain the institution that Jews considered the 'pride of every Southern Israelite.' While Trestman celebrates the home's many triumphs, she delves deeply into its failures. Most Fortunate Unfortunates is sure to be of widespread interest to readers interested in southern Jewish history, gender and race relations, and the evolution of social work and dependent childcare"--

For decades, military historians have argued that the introduction of the rifle musket-with a range five times longer than that of the smoothbore musket-made the shoulder-to-shoulder formations of linear tactics obsolete. Author Earl J. Hess challenges this deeply entrenched assumption. He contends that long-range rifle fire did not dominate Civil War battlefields or dramatically alter the course of the conflict because soldiers had neither the training nor the desire to take advantage of the musket rifle's increased range. Drawing on the drill manuals available to officers and a close reading of battle reports, Civil War Infantry Tactics demonstrates that linear tactics provided the best formations and maneuvers to use with the single-shot musket, whether rifle or smoothbore. The linear system was far from an outdated relic that led to higher casualties and prolonged the war. Indeed, regimental officers on both sides of the conflict found the formations and maneuvers in use since the era of the French Revolution to be indispensable to the survival of their units on the battlefield. The training soldiers received in this system, combined with their extensive experience in combat, allowed small units a high level of articulation and effectiveness. Unlike much military history that focuses on grand strategies, Hess zeroes in on formations and maneuvers (or primary tactics), describing their purpose and usefulness in regimental case studies, and pinpointing which of them were favorites of unit commanders in the field. The Civil War was the last conflict in North America to see widespread use of the linear tactical system, and Hess convincingly argues that the war also saw the most effective tactical performance yet in America's short history.

"Focusing on the crucial period of 1820 to 1860, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster examines the strong economic bonds between the antebellum plantation South and the burgeoning city of New York that resulted from the highly lucrative trade in cotton. In this richly detailed work of literary and cultural history, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. charts how the partnership brought fantastic wealth to both the South and Gotham during the first half of the nineteenth century. That mutually beneficial alliance also cemented New York's reputation as the northern metropolis most supportive of and hospitable to southerners. Both parties initially found the commercial and cultural entente advantageous, but their collaboration grew increasingly fraught by the 1840s as rising abolitionist sentiment in the North decried the system of chattel slavery that made possible the mass production of cotton. In an effort to stem the swelling tide of abolitionism, conservative southerners demanded absolute political fealty to their peculiar institution from the city that had profited most from the cotton trade. By 1861, reactionary circles in the South viewed New York's failure to extend such unalloyed validation as the betrayal of an erstwhile ally that in the words of one polemicist deemed Gotham worthy of being "blotted from the list of cities." Drawing on contemporary letters, diaries, fiction, and travel writings, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster provides the first detailed study of the complicated relationship between the antebellum South and New York City in the decades leading up to the Civil War"--

"When Bad Men Combine is the first full-length scholarly work to examine the notorious Star Route scandal, which roiled American politics in the 1870s and 1880s. With its dramatic twists and turns, the scandal captured the nation's attention for the better part of a decade. Newspaper headlines throughout the country bore headlines decrying "Fraud at Its Finest" and the "Slickest of Swindles." The scandal itself centered on manipulating Western postal delivery contracts by cunning entrepreneurs and their accomplices within what was then known as the Post Office Department. It reached its height with two sensational criminal trials, during which evidence implicated some of the most prominent men in America, including two presidents, several current and former members of Congress, a handful of cabinet members, and small armies of federal prosecutors and defense attorneys. The scandal also involved an assassination, the bribing of juries, the possible theft-by government attorneys, no less - of important documents, and witnesses fleeing to other countries to avoid subpoenas. Based on a wide variety of primary and secondary source materials, including trial transcripts, congressional testimony, and private correspondence, Shawn Peters's "When Bad Men Combine" provides a first-ever glimpse into a uniquely tumultuous period in American political history. Comprehensively tracking the trajectory of the Star Route scandal, he reveals how modern politics emerged, in fits and starts, from the enormous upheaval wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. One crucial change came occurred in government itself. A dizzying and seemingly nonstop succession of scandals plagued American politics in the 1870s. The "era of good stealings," as one historian has dubbed it, featured numerous infamous examples of federal officials abusing their positions to enrich themselves and their allies. The Star Route case was, in some respects, the final straw for those who believed that the time had come for a system grounded in avarice and political patronage to be replaced by one based on merit, competence, and a commitment to the core principles of good government. As Peters shows, it was no coincidence that President Arthur signed the landmark Pendleton Civil Service Act into law in the middle of the second Star Route trial"--

When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further--to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons--Englishmen of German descent--some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament--differences that made civil war inevitable.

"Louisiana Paperback Edition, 1995, reissued 2023"--Title page verso.

Often overlooked in historic studies of New Orleans, the city's Hispanic and Latino populations have contributed significantly to its development. Hispanic and Latino New Orleans offers the first scholarly study of these communities in the Crescent City. This trailblazing volume not only explores the evolving role of Hispanics and Latinos in shaping the city's unique cultural identity but also reveals how their history informs the ongoing national debate about immigration.As early as the eighteenth century, the Spanish government used incentives of land and money to encourage Spaniards from other regions of the empire-particularly the Canary Islands-to settle in and around New Orleans. Though immigration from Spain declined markedly in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the city quickly became the gateway between the United States and the emerging independent republics of Latin America. The burgeoning trade in coffee, sugar, and bananas attracted Cuban and Honduran immigrants to New Orleans, while smaller communities of Hispanics and Latinos from countries such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Brazil also made their marks on the landscapes and neighborhoods of the city, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Combining accessible historical narrative, interviews, and maps that illustrate changing residential geographies, Hispanic and Latino New Orleans is a landmark study of the political, economic, and cultural networks that produced these diverse communities in one of the country's most distinctive cities.