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Inspired by a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn" - which depicts a former artist's model in her declining years, still full of life and facing death with flair and wit - Kathryn Byer finds a voice to contemplate the enigmatic but inevitable process of growing old.

Emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byer's fascination with female ballad singers in southern Appalachia, whose voices haunt the mountains still, and from the image of a black net or shawl being dragged over the ground, plumbing the depths, collecting bits and fragments of a woman's life.

The story of General Price - as this account by Albert Castle shows - is the story, in large part, of the Confederacy's struggle in the West. The author draws a fascinating portrait of Price the man - vain, courageous, addicted to secrecy - and produces insightful interpretations and much pertinent information about the Civil War in the West.

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilises Mrs. Chesnut's autobiographical writings, her papers, and those of her family, as well as published sources.

Traces the departures, voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire.

In this illuminating work, Robert B. Holtman emphasizes Napoleon's role as a revolutionary innovator whose influence touched nearly every aspect of European political and social life and has extended even to our own times.

Examines case histories from the First District Court of New Orleans and tells the engrossing story of prostitution in the city prior to the Civil War. Relying on previously unexamined court records and newspaper articles, Schafer ably details the brutal and often harrowing lives of the women and young girls who engaged in prostitution.

Explores what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, Michael Chitwood meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand.

Always spirited and elegant, by turns witty and meditative, Catharine Savage Brosman's Under the Pergola contemplates Louisiana, past and present, before traveling a broader path that crosses Colorado landscapes and the island of Sicily.In her eighth collection of poems, Brosman evokes the Pelican State's trees, birds, rivers, swamps, bayous, New Orleans scenes, historic houses, and colorful characters. She also recounts, in free verse, formal verse, and one prose poem, the "misdeeds of Katrina" as she and others experienced them.Other poems range widely, from reflections on writers Samuel Johnson, Paul Claudel, André Malraux, and James Dickey to quiet meditations on the American West, Odysseus, fruits and vegetables, and the recent "light years" of the poet's life -- which she characterizes as "silken... slipping smoothly off" like a gown.

Set against a backdrop of a nation exhausted by war, in a decadent city that for years has been denied its butter, sugar, and Mardi Gras, My Bright Midnight is a novel about the complications of loyalties to country, to friends, and to those we love.

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South.

This is an altogether engaging collection of ruminations on early New Orleans writers - George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate Chopin - as well as three prolific twentieth-century authors who called the Crescent City "home" at various times: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy.

"August First Day" became the most important annual celebration of emancipation among people of African descent in the northern US, the British Caribbean, Canada West, and the UK and played a critical role in popular mobilization against American slavery. J.R. Kerr-Ritchie provides the first detailed analysis of this important commemoration.

This valuable study of Flannery O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader.

Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Keeping the Beat on the Street celebrates the renewed passion and pageantry among black brass bands in New Orleans. Mick Burns introduces the people who play the music and shares their insights, showing why New Orleans is the place where jazz continues to grow.

Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. We have long known that travel broadens; in these poems, it also deepens and makes wiser.

Born into a wealthy Mississippi plantation family in 1843, David Eldred Holt joined Company K of the 16th Mississippi Regiment in 1861 and served in the Eastern theatre throughout the Civil War. This memoir recounts the idyllic life of an affluent southern boy before the war and the exhilarating, sometimes humorous, experiences of a common soldier.

The first published personal narrative by a regimental commander of free black troops, Thank God My Regiment an African One offers a unique glimpse into the daily lives of white leaders of the earliest black soldiers. It is a significant contribution to the ongoing documentation of the experience of black troops in the Civil War.

Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well, however, Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit.

Three veteran newspapermen examine the history and character of one of America's most remarkable states. This comprehensive, entertaining work will inform natives of their rich heritage and familiarize others with the many sources of Louisiana's special charm.

Presents Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change - from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business centre to its present-day languishing.

In a major reinterpretation, Resisting History reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged.

In Myself Painting Clarence Major seeks to recreate for readers the inexpressible feeling that comes from creating art, with poems that speak not of painting itself but of its underlying process.

In 1880, George Washington Cable was commissioned to write a "historical sketch" of pre-Civil War New Orleans for a special section of the Tenth U.S. Census. With The New Orleans of George Washington Cable, Lawrence Powell presents this rare text in its entirety for the first time, including Cable's copious footnotes.

For nearly five decades, award-winning poet Brendan Galvin has written about the birds of the tidal flats, woods, and marshes around his Cape Cod home and on islands in the North Atlantic. He knows their field marks, habits, and songs, and his work demonstrates an obvious fascination with them. Whirl Is King gathers forty-three of his bird poems about herons, owls, shorebirds, warblers, raptors, wrens, and other exotic visitors blown in by wind and storm.Seen from various angles and stratagems, Galvin's migrants and locals are always in motion, acting and acted upon, sometimes predatory, sometimes possessing mythic qualities. In tones ranging from the elegiac to the hilarious, these poems inhabit the overlapping borders of human and avian life: "not to salute such / charity of song / though it be plain as / thumbsqueaks on clear windowpanes, / not to say their names, / and the shadow of death passes / across our tongues." Whirl Is King features Galvin's hallmark descriptive powers and verbal music on full display and demonstrates his talent as a contemporary poet.

Irish poet Greg Delanty presents a series of poems that explore the birth of a child. These poems log the days before and after a child is born, detailing the wonder and trepidation of parents, the growth of the child, and speculation on the soul and spirit. Written from the vantage point of a father--his hopes, fears, awe, and perplexity--these poems register the seen and unseen interconnections of place, people, the natural world, and the continuity of the past with the present and the future.

Colorfully known as the "Greyhound Division" for its lean and speedy marches across thousands of miles in three states, Major General John G. Walker's infantry division in the Confederate army was the largest body of Texans -- about 12,000 men at its formation -- to serve in the American Civil War. From its creation in 1862 until its disbandment at the war's end, Walker's unit remained, uniquely for either side in the conflict, a stable group of soldiers from a single state. Richard Lowe's compelling saga shows how this collection of farm boys, store clerks, carpenters, and lawyers became the trans-Mississippi's most potent Confederate fighting unit, from the vain attack at Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, in 1863 during Grant's Vicksburg Campaign to stellar performances at the battles of Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins' Ferry that helped repel Nathaniel P. Banks's Red River Campaign of 1864. Lowe's skillful blending of narrative drive and demographic profiling represents an innovative history of the period that is sure to set a new benchmark.

Scholars of reconstruction have generally described Republican Party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the racial agenda evoked unified black support. This study aims to show that that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intaracial dynamic.