In the 1930s, thousands of formerly enslaved Americans were interviewed across the United States as part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project. While most of those interviews were subsequently published, Louisiana's were not. Gathered here for the first time in complete and contextualized form are the full interviews with ......
Despite several decades of scholarship on African diasporic religion, Voodoo remains underexamined, and the few books published on the topic contain inaccuracies and outmoded arguments. In Voodoo: An African American Religion, Jeffrey E. Anderson presents a much-needed modern account of the faith as it existed in the Mississippi River valley from ......
The Politics of Religion in New Orleans, 1881-1940
The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New ......
Walt Whitman's short stint in New Orleans during the spring of 1848 was a crucial moment of literary and personal development, with many celebrated poems from Leaves of Grass showing its influence. Walt Whitman's New Orleans is the first book dedicated to republishing his writings about the Crescent City, including numerous previously unknown ......
Joshua R. Shiver's War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source ......
When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, causing more than 1,800 deaths and more than $100 billion in damages, it was deemed a "once-in-a-lifetime storm." After the hurricane, over 1.5 million volunteers came to New Orleans through various nonprofit organizations, and around 500 new charities were established to aid the city's recovery. We Came to ......
What Light He Saw I Cannot Say, a new poetry collection from Sidney Burris, explores the interplay of human consciousness and objective reality, always in celebration of the imaginative spirit that brings them into a productive and often spiritual conversation. Poems both demanding and beguiling gain a deeper resonance as they encourage us to ......
Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Christopher Kempf's What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as setting and subject for poetry that engages ongoing conversations about race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory in the United States. With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the ......
The Star Route Scandal and the Twilight of Gilded Age Politics
The Star Route scandal captured the nation's attention for more than a decade, with newspapers throughout the United States characterizing it as an unprecedented case of Gilded Age graft. Shawn Francis Peters's When Bad Men Combine provides a glimpse into this uniquely tumultuous period marked by brazen greed and duplicity. In the first book to ......
