umiss03

Printmaking in New Orleans

Edited by Jessie J. Poesch

With contributions by Barbara SoRelle Bacot, H. Parrott Bacot, Judith H. Bonner, Patricia Brady, Gay M. Gomez, Florence M. Jumonville, Claudia Kheel, John H. Lawrence, Priscilla Lawrence, Alfred E. Lemmon, John Magill, John A. Mahé II, Earl Retif, Kellye M. Rosenheim

A lavishly illustrated chronicle of graphic artistry from colonial times through the twentieth century

Printmaking in New Orleans contains a wealth of information about the graphic arts in New Orleans. A visually stunning book, spanning cultural strata from highbrow to pop, it is the first publication to examine Louisiana printmaking in depth. Edited and with an introduction by Jessie J. Poesch, Printmaking in New Orleans takes its place among the definitive works of southern cultural history.

The book's fourteen chapters were prepared by participants in a symposium organized by the North American Print Conference. The original symposium-sponsored by the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Louisiana State Museum-assembled an impressive group of experts familiar with engravings, lithographs, photographs, maps, commercial illustrations, and sheet music of New Orleans. The prints discussed at the symposium-and reproduced in this volume-present an essential visual record of the city's development. Cultural studies of New Orleans traditionally focus on the city's jazz heritage and distinctive architecture. Printmaking in New Orleans opens a window on a unique and hitherto under-represented aspect of regional history.

The book traces the development of printmaking from colonial times through the present and features considerable biographical information about the printmakers themselves. The book's subjects include the European publishers who produced books about colonial Louisiana for curious eighteenth-century readers; the eastern-seaboard publishers who produced images of New Orleans in the early nineteenth century; the French and German immigrants who settled in antebellum New Orleans and introduced new lithographic techniques; and the local artists who worked in various print media after the Civil War and throughout the twentieth century.

Jessie J. Poesch, New Orleans, Louisiana, is professor emerita of art history at Newcomb College of Tulane University. She is the author of such books as Early Furniture of Louisiana , The Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560-1860 , and Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for Southern Women, 1885-1904 . Her work has appeared in such periodicals as the Art Bulletin and American Art Journal .

AUGUST, 256 pages (approx.), 8½ x11 inches, 125 b&w photographs, 60 color photographs, index

ISBN 1-57806-768-5, cloth

ART048000 ART024000 ART015000
Copublished with the Historic New Orleans Collection

Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835

By David J. Libby

A new look at the evolution of this frontier society and its unyielding grip on slavery

In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture.

The colonial French introduced African slaves into this borderlands region situated on the periphery of French, Spanish, and English empires. In this frontier, planter society made unsuccessful attempts to produce tobacco, lumber, and indigo. Slavery outlasted each failed harvest. Through each era plantation culture rode the back of a system far removed from the romantic stereotype.

Almost simultaneously as Mississippi became a United States territory in the 1790s, cotton became the cash crop. The booming King Cotton economy changed Mississippi and adapted the slave system that was its foundation.

Some Mississippi slaves resisted this grim oppression and rebelled by flight, work slowdowns, arson, and conspiracies. In 1835 a slave conspiracy in Madison County provoked such draconian response among local slave holders that planters throughout the state redoubled the iron locks on the system. Race relations in the state remained radicalized for many generations to follow.

Beginning with the arrival of the first African slaves in the colony and extending over 115 years, this book is the first such history since Charles Sydnor's Slavery in Mississippi (1933).

David J. Libby, an independent scholar, lives in San Antonio, Texas. His work has been published in CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture.

FEBRUARY 2004, 6 x 9 inches, 208 pages (approx.), bibliography, index
ISBN 1-57806-599-2, cloth, $40.00S
BISAC HIS036000
HIS036010
SOC001000

Britain and the American South
From Colonialism to Rock and Roll

Edited by Joseph P. Ward

With essays by R. J. M. Blackett, Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Holly Brewer, S. Max Edelson, Franklin T. Lambert, Michael O'Brien, Brian Ward, Hugh Wilford, Marcus Wood

Essays that trace the long inter-relationship between Britain and the American South in music, religion, and trade

Credit: A British cartoon of the American eagle picking the stuffing out of the King Cotton South, courtesy of the Sussex University Library
In Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll, historians analyze central aspects of the cultural exchanges between Britain and the American South.

Along with the Spanish and the French, the British were among the first Europeans to have contact with the native peoples in what would come to be known as the American South. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British were intensively engaged in colonizing much of the region and developing its economy. The American Revolution severed the governmental links between Britain and its Southern colonies, but economic, social, religious, and cultural ties persevered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll illuminates Britain's evolving relationship with the South over a period of four centuries, an era that witnessed Britain's rise to imperial dominance and then the gradual erosion of its influence on the wider world. It considers the British influence upon-and often critical responses to-Southern institutions and cultural formations such as religion, gentility, slavery, and music.
Two chapters focus on Britain's response to the Confederacy, while other essays look even further into the past, concentrating on the English legacy in colonial times, its influence on Southern religion, and Britain's relationship with the Creek Indians. Moving into the twentieth century, the book features analysis of the South's relationship to the British Left from 1930 to 1960, and an investigation of the South's role in 1950s British popular music.
With an engaging afterword that explores the difficulties in comprehending both Britain and the American South in the present day as well as in the past, this book shows that the relationship between the two has always been-and continues to be-complex, subtle, and meaningful.
Joseph P. Ward, an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, is the author of Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London and the co-editor of Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England and The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850.

NOVEMBER 2003, 6 x 9 inches, 224 pages (approx.), 20 line illustrations, documentary notes, index
ISBN 1-57806-580-1, cloth, $45.00S
Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History Series
BISAC HIS036000
HIS015000

Mississippi
A Documentary History

Edited by Bradley G. Bond

The unfolding story of the Magnolia State as told in this striking collection of its historical documents
Picture credit: Mississippi Department of Archives and History

In America's collective imagination, Mississippi, a state that aptly may be described as the most southern place in America, is often deemed a sinister, forbidding landscape. While popular conceptions of other states are evoked by rosy likenesses chosen by promoters of tourism, the mere word Mississippi too often conjures thoughts of brutality, repression, and backwardness. To many outsiders, Mississippi's controversial history continues to resonate in the present.

By allowing divergent historical voices to describe their understanding of events as they were unfolding, this new book of narrative history supports, emends, and even complicates such a vision of Mississippi's past and present. The only book ever to present Mississippi's story in a chronological documentary fashion, it includes a wide variety of public records, newspaper articles, academic papers, correspondence, ordinances, constitutional amendments, journal entries, and other documents.

Collected and placed together, they compose a narrative that reveals the state in all its great diversity of peoples and terrains--free and slave; rich, poor, and middling; coastal, hill country, Delta; black, white, and Native American.

Several chapters, particularly those on antebellum Mississippi and Reconstruction, represent recent scholarly views and correct lingering misconceptions of those years. The editor and compiler has written an introduction to each section and has placed the documents in an appropriate historical context that makes them accessible to students, scholars, archivists, librarians, and lay readers alike.

Although many of these documents are well known, many also have never been seen since their inception. In juxtaposition they offer a striking portrait. The parts and the whole alike show that Mississippi remains ever controversial, ever puzzling, ever fascinating.

Bradley G. Bond is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Political Culture in the 19th-Century South.

JUNE, 6 x 9 inches, 272 pages (approx.), index
ISBN 1-57806-541-0, cloth, $45.00T
BISAC HIS036010

March 4, 2005