Louisiana Healing Garden offers a guide to the medicinal properties of everyday plants such as crape myrtle, gardenia, and sweet olive, encouraging readers to learn about these plants and their uses while maintaining a healthy ecological balance in their home spaces. In this follow-up to Louisiana Herb Journal, herbalist Corinne Martin ......
Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Jesse Olsavsky's The Most Absolute Abolition tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the ......
White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction
During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler investigates the lives of ......
In A Southern Moderate in Radical Times, David I. Durham offers a comprehensive and critical appraisal of one of the South's famous dissenters. Against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in American history, he explores the ideological and political journey of Henry Washington Hilliard (1808-1892), a southern politician whose ......
Steady Daylight, the latest volume of poetry from Joseph Bathanti, returns to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The speaker traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the "old" East ......
The Louisiana Native Guards and the Black Military's Significance in the Civil War
A. J. Cade's Death or Victory offers the first in-depth history of the Louisiana Native Guards, pioneering African American regiments within the Union army. Originating as a division of the New Orleans Home Guards in May 1861, the Native Guards consisted of free Black and Creole men who leveraged the city's established military customs to gain ......
In Karen Blixen's Search for Self, Patti M. Marxsen presents a twenty-first-century reconsideration of Blixen's iconic memoir Out of Africa, originally published in 1937 and now regarded as a classic of twentieth-century literature. The methodology of this "book about a book" draws on seasoned historical perspectives of European colonial ......
Henry B. Motty's A Desperate Fight views Civil War Louisiana through the lens of its soldiers' experiences-and interdependence-with civilians. Louisiana fielded approximately sixty thousand men for the Confederacy, equaling nearly 18 percent of the state's white population. Most of these men came straight from civilian life. Although separated ......
Kenneth W. Noe's Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the ......
