Acadiana

Acadiana

Author: Carl A. Brasseaux

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-05-18

Total Pages: 708

ISBN-13: 0807139653

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"Acadiana" summons up visions of a legendary and exotic world of moss-draped cypress, cocoa-colored bayous, subtropical wildlife, and spicy indigenous cuisine. The ancestral home of Cajuns and Creoles, this twenty-two-parish area of south Louisiana encompasses a broad range of people, places, and events. In their historical and pictorial tour of the region, author Carl A. Brasseaux and photographer Philip Gould explore in depth this fascinating and complex world. As passionate documentarians of all things Cajun and Creole, Brasseaux and Gould delve into the topography, culture, and economy of Acadiana. In two hundred color photographs of architecture, landscapes, wildlife, and artifacts, Gould portrays the rich history still visible in the area, while Brasseaux's engagingly written narrative covers the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century story of settlement and development in the region. Brasseaux brings the story up to date, recounting devastating hurricanes and coastal degradation. From living-history attractions such as Vermilionville, the Acadian Village, and Longfellow-Evangeline State Park to music venues, festivals, and crawfish boils, Acadiana depicts a resilient and vibrant way of life and presents a vivid portrait of a culture that continues to captivate, charm, and endure. For all those who want to explore these people and this place, Brasseaux and Gould have provided an insightful written and visual history.


For Duty and Destiny

For Duty and Destiny

Author: Lloyd A. Hunter

Publisher: Indiana Historical Society

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 0871953692

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William Taylor Stott was a native Hoosier and an 1861 graduate of Franklin College, who later became the president who took the college from virtual bankruptcy in 1872 to its place as a leading liberal arts institution in Indiana. The story of Franklin College is the story of W. T. Stott, yet his influence was not confined to the school’s parameters. Stott was an inspirational and intellectual force in the Indiana Baptist community, and a foremost champion of small denominational colleges and of higher education in general. He also fought in the Eighteenth Indiana Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, rising from private to captain by 1863. Stott’s diary reveals a soldier who was also a scholar.


Acadian to Cajun

Acadian to Cajun

Author: Carl A. Brasseaux

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9781617031113

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"This work serves as a model for compiling ethnohistories of other nonliterate peoples."--BOOK JACKET.


Pretense Of Glory

Pretense Of Glory

Author: James G. Hollandsworth, Jr.

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1998-11-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0807151254

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In this first modern biography of Nathaniel P. Banks, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., reveals the complicated and contradictory nature of the man who called himself the "fighting politician." Despite a lack of formal education, family connections, and personal fortune, Banks (1816--1884) advanced from the Massachusetts legislature to the governorship to the U.S. Congress and Speaker of the House. He learned early in his political career that the pretext of conviction can be more important than the conviction itself, and he practiced a politics of expedience, espousing popular beliefs but never defining beliefs of his own. A leader in the new Republican party, he developed a reputation as a compelling orator and a politician with a bright future. At the onset of the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Banks a major general, and, as Hollandsworth shows, the same pretext of conviction that served Banks so well in politics proved disastrous on the battlefield. He suffered resounding defeats in the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, the Battle of Cedar Mountain, and the Red River Campaign. Illuminating the personal characteristics that stalled the promise of Banks's early political career and contributed to his dismal record as a commanding officer, Hollandsworth demonstrates how Banks's obsessive pretense of glory prevented him from achieving its reality.


Legendary Louisiana Outlaws

Legendary Louisiana Outlaws

Author: Keagan LeJeune

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2016-03-21

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0807162582

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From the infamous pirate Jean Laffite and the storied couple Bonnie and Clyde, to less familiar bandits like train-robber Eugene Bunch and suspected murderer Leather Britches Smith, Legendary Louisiana Outlaws explores Louisiana's most fascinating fugitives. In this entertaining volume, Keagan LeJeune draws from historical accounts and current folklore to examine the specific moments and legal climate that spawned these memorable characters. He shows how Laffite embodied Louisiana's shift from an entrenched French and Spanish legal system to an American one, and relates how the notorious groups like the West and Kimbrell Clan served as community leaders and law officers but covertly preyed on Louisiana's Neutral Strip residents until citizens took the law into their own hands. Likewise, the bootlegging Dunn brothers in Vinton, he explains, demonstrate folk justice's distinction between an acceptable criminal act (operating an illegal moonshine still) and an unacceptable one (cold-blooded murder). Recounting each outlaw's life, LeJeune also considers their motives for breaking the law as well as their attempts at evading capture. Running from authorities and trying to escape imprisonment or even death, these men and women often relied on the support of ordinary citizens, sympathetic in the face of oppressive and unfair laws. Through the lens of folk life, LeJeune's engaging narrative demonstrates how a justice system functions and changes and highlights Louisiana's particular challenges in adapting a system of law and order to work for everyone.


Walker's Texas Division, C.S.A.

Walker's Texas Division, C.S.A.

Author: Richard Lowe

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2006-04-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0807131539

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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.


No Spark of Malice

No Spark of Malice

Author: William Arceneaux

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2004-10-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780807130254

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On April 22, 1896, Martin Begnaud was brutally murdered in his general store in Scott Station, Louisiana. He was bound, gagged, blindfolded, stabbed more than fifty times, and robbed of over $5,000. Ten months later, after one of the most extensive manhunts in nineteenth-century Louisiana, public shock and outrage reemerged when two teenage brothers from France, Ernest and Alexis Blanc, were arrested for the crime. William Arceneaux sets the story of Begnaud's murder, the Blanc brothers' trial, and the media circus surrounding it all against the backdrop of Acadian history -- from the 1604 establishment of a French colony in the Canadian maritime provinces to the eventual creation of a "New Acadia"in South Louisiana. By intertwining a suspenseful account of this heinous crime with an exploration of the citizens it affected, No Spark of Malice provides insight into a fascinating people, place, and era.


More Generals in Gray

More Generals in Gray

Author: Bruce S. Allardice

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2006-04-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780807131480

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In this masterpiece of research, a splendid supplement to Ezra J. Warner's Generals in Gray, Bruce S. Allardice brings to light a neglected class of officers: the Confederacy's "other" generals -- men who attained their rank outside the usual avenue of appointment by President Jefferson Davis and who had been virtually forgotten as a consequence. Explaining that the process of becoming a general was fraught with politics, lobbying, intrigue, accident, mismanagement, and chance, Allardice identifies six main categories of legitimate claimants to the rank of Confederate General -- two more than historians have traditionally recognized. He presents a substantial biographical sketch of 137 generals not found in Warner's original and a short bibliography of each. For the vast majority, his is the first treatment ever published.