In The Politics of Faith during the Civil War, Timothy L. Wesley examines the engagement of both northern and southern preachers in politics during the American Civil War, revealing an era of denominational, governmental, and public scrutiny of religious leaders. Controversial ministers risked ostracism within the local community, censure from ......
Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim
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 ......
Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush
The Presidents and the Planet recounts the story of the world's greatest environmental dilemma through the eyes of early climate change pioneers. It begins in the 1950s, when American scientists first warned about the risks of pollution altering the natural climate in dramatic ways, the national media began covering the matter, and experts first ......
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 ......
The Ramos Gin Fizz was invented sometime around 1890 by Henry Charles "Carl" Ramos at his Imperial Cabinet saloon in New Orleans. It includes lemon and lime juice, egg white, cream, and orange flower water, and, shaken properly, it becomes a foamy white concoction that has been called "the nectar of New Orleans," "the Cadillac of Cocktails," and ......
On the day after Christmas in 1811, the state of Virginia lost its governor and almost one hundred citizens in a devastating nighttime fire that consumed a Richmond playhouse. During the second act of a melodramatic tale of bandits, ghosts, and murder, a small fire kindled behind the backdrop. Within minutes, it raced to the ceiling timbers and ......
Founded in 1917, Paramount Records incongruously was one of several homegrown record labels of a Wisconsin chair-making company. The company pinned no outsized hopes on Paramount. Its founders knew nothing of the music business, and they had arrived at the scheme of producing records only to drive sales of the expensive phonograph cabinets they ......
Darby's Rangers and Their Most Consequential Battle in World War II
The Road to Cisterna is the story of Darby's Rangers, an elite American army unit in World War II, selected for toughness and specially trained in beach landings and lightning raids deep behind enemy lines. Commanded by Colonel William Orlando Darby, the 1st Ranger Battalion spearheaded landings in North Africa and helped defeat German general ......
Almost lost to history, the Roffignac has long been one of New Orleans's most mysterious cocktails. While drinks such as the Sazerac and the Ramos gin fizz enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the craft cocktail movement of the early twenty-first century, resurrecting the Roffignac has proved a more difficult task. Named for ......
