This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password ..read more

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password ..read more

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password ..read more

By Johnny Armstrong In this post, Johnny Armstrong answers questions about his new book, Rescuing Biodiversity: The Protection and Restoration of a North Louisiana Ecosystem. Narrowleaf sunflowers and white snakeroot, from Rescuing Biodiversity What inspired you to write Rescuing Biodiversity? Back around the time I was trying to get permanent protection for Wafer Creek Ranch (WCR), I began writing what I intended to be a small manual for my children. It was my effort to explain WCR’s ecological value and the importance of protecting its habitats, mainly consisting of mature and old-growth mix ..read more

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password ..read more

By Gregg Andrews To celebrate its being awarded the James V. Swift Medal for Excellence in Maritime Literature, we share here an excerpt from the introduction of Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875–1930. This section of the book describes the unique, eclectic, and sometimes dangerous world of the St. Louis levee and the outsiders who called it home. Houseboat along Ohio River near Rochester, Pennsylvania, 1940. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. “The steamboat age perfectly expressed America,” wrote Bernard DeVoto in Mark Twain’s America in 1932. Th ..read more

By Nikesha Elise Williams In this post, we celebrate both Black History Month and the Mardi Gras season by presenting an excerpt from our new book Mardi Gras Indians, by Nikesha Elise Williams. Keelian Boyd. Courtesy Matthew Hinton. There is no one single, definitive origin story that pinpoints the beginnings of what has been extrapolated over centuries into today’s Black masking, or Mardi Gras, Indian culture. Instead, there is a multiplicity of stories that have more or less fidelity to a truth none of us were alive to know. The accuracy of these stories about what led African American men a ..read more

By Eric Michael Burke In this post, Eric Michael Burke recounts the circumstances that led William Tecumseh Sherman to confess, “I have not the confidence of a Leader in this war,” as he struggled to command and control tens of thousands of volunteer troops with no battleground experience. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress It was indeed a “magnificent sight” to stand on the hurricane deck and gaze back through the soot-filled air at the order, system, and spartan organization arrayed before him that Christmas Eve, 1862. Fifty-nine steamers trailed the Forest Queen, the flagship of Majo ..read more

By Ruth Laney Ruth Laney shares how an impromptu interview inspired a love of storytelling and led to a decades-long friendship with one of Louisiana’s most celebrated writers. Ernest J. Gaines and Ruth Laney at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, February 1977. Gaines read from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series. Photo courtesy of Tom Whitehead. In late October 1972, I was a copy editor at Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge. As I worked at my desk on the second floor of Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus ..read more

By Raquel Kennon Raquel Kennon reveals how her family’s lineage intersected with her academic training and resulted in a book tracing the literary and cultural legacies of slavery in the Americas. Jean-Baptiste Debret’s Le Dîner (“A Brazilian Dinner”), 1827, one of the works studied in Afrodiasporic Forms Sugar. Sculpture. Mammy. A celebrated telenovela. Lithographs of the era of slavery in Brazil. Poetry of the slave ship and the Middle Passage. A vibrant painting of the Gate of Return. What do these disparate cultural products have in common? As I discuss in Afrodiasporic ..read more