The Memoir and Diary of Shirley Rose Gray, June-August 1945
Shirley Rose Gray's memoir and diary chronicle her World War II experiences with a USO show in the Pacific Theater during the summer of 1945. Part of comedic film actor Eddie Bracken's troupe of entertainers, the twenty-two-year-old native of Los Angeles performed on bitterly contested islands such as Guam, Peleliu, Tinian, and Saipan, as well as ......
In Shades of Complicity, Michael W. Fitzgerald explores one family's involvement with the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Using the newly available Pickens family correspondence housed at the University of South Alabama, he examines the varying roles of family members as terrorists, supporters, and observers. After the Civil War, the ......
This book is the sequel to Kathleen M. Byrd's 2024 study, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1803-1840: A Creole Community on the American Frontier. Picking up the story in the 1840s and taking it through the Civil War, Byrd shows in this volume the economic activities of not only the planters and their enslaved workers but also the upland farmers, ......
Women and the Creole Community in Early Jim Crow New Orleans
Between 1880 and 1910, as Jim Crow's legal apparatus transformed Louisiana's complex racial landscape into a stark binary, Creole women fought to preserve their community's distinctive identity through the most ordinary acts of daily life. In their households, they cultivated kinship arrangements that prioritized mutual care over conventional ......
Making Freedom Work tells the stories of five free women of color in antebellum New Orleans. The lives of Eulalie Mandeville, Henriette Delille, Marie Couvent, Cecille Bonille, and Marie Dolores Laveaux reveal the economic, legal, and cultural strategies free Black women used to move through a racially stratified, patriarchal slave society. Janet ......
"The veriest offscouring of the earth." That was how one Confederate soldier remembered the men of Wheat's Battalion, better known as the Louisiana Tigers. The Tigers were widely considered, by northerners and southerners alike, the wildest and wickedest unit in the South-a reputation that has long overshadowed the individual lives of the men who ......
James O. Heath's Deep South Democrats is the story of three men who redefined the southern political landscape through unique voting records in health, housing, labor, and education. Olin Johnston of South Carolina and John Sparkman and Lister Hill of Alabama contributed to the massive impact of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the southern ......
St. Joseph's Day in New Orleans investigates the origins and evolution of the St. Joseph's Day holiday, revealing its deep connection to the mid-Lent celebration known as Mi-Careme. Initially conceived as a welcome break from Lent's austerity, mid-Lent featured masked balls, dancing, and exuberant public revelry-traditions later associated solely ......
A giant of political journalism, Lou Cannon rose to prominence as state bureau chief for the San Jose Mercury News in the late 1960s, covering then-governor of California Ronald Reagan. In 1972, he became a political reporter for The Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in the United States, where he would remain until 2008. Best known for ......
