LSU Press Blog

LSU Press author Larry Powell elected as SAH Fellow

Congratulations to LSU Press author Lawrence N. Powell, who was recently elected as a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.  Fellows are chosen in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction of their historical writing.   LSU Press recently published The New Orleans of George Washington Cable: The 1887 Census Office Report, edited with an introduction by Mr. Powell.   

Candid Observations of Louisiana’s Earliest Missionary Nuns

In 1727, twelve nuns left France to establish a community of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, the capital of the French colony of Louisiana. Their convent was the first in the territory that would eventually be part of the United States. Notable for establishing a school that educated all free girls, regardless of social rank, the Ursulines also ran an orphanage, administered the colony’s military hospital, and sustained an aggressive program of catechesis among the enslaved population of colonial Louisiana that contributed to the development of a large, active Afro-Catholic congregation in New Orleans. In Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727–1760, published this month, Emily Clark extends the boundaries of early American women’s history through the first-hand accounts of these remarkable French female missionaries, in particular Marie Madeleine Hachard.

A recent review in the New Orleans Times-Picayune says "The story of the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans is one of women's adventurous spirits, strong wills and good hearts." Click here to read the entire review on the New Orleans Times-Picayune web site.

National Praise for Williams and Mazzari

Miller Williams's Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It, was featured in the Los Angeles Times and praised for his ability to convey how poetry is necessary to the human spirit.  Williams, professor emeritus of English at the University of Arkansas and poet for Bill Clinton's second presidential inauguration, is also the father of singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.

The Wall Street Journal recently reviwed Southern Modernist: Arthur Raper from the New Deal to the Cold War by Louis Mazzari, calling it "an engaging account of this indefatigable do-gooder, capturing along the way a lot of period detail about the South and about the social world that Raper was investigating." Mazzari's is the first biography of on influential southern sociologist who advocated racial justice in an effort to modernize the South.

LSU Press Congratulates Drew Gilpin Faust

On July 1, LSU Press author Drew Gilpin Faust will become the first woman president of Harvard University. The former professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976-2000 and dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and professor of History at Harvard University since 2001, Faust is also the first president to not hold a degree from Harvard since 1672.

She is the author of James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, and The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South and editor of The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860. For more on this historic appointment, visit the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website here.