In this refreshingly candid intellectual autobiography, Robert C. Smith traces the evolution of his consciousness and identity from his early days in rural Louisiana to his emergence as one of the nation's leading scholars of African American politics. He interweaves this personal narrative with the significant events and cultural flashpoints of the last half of the twentieth century, including the Watts Rebellion, the rise of the Black Power movement, the tumultuous protests at Berkeley, and the sex and drug revolutions of the 1960s. As a graduate student he experiences the founding of Black Studies, the grounding in blackness at Howard University, and, as a professor, the swirling controversies and contradictions of Black Studies and feminism at San Francisco State University. Smith also locates his story in the context of the scholarly literature on African American politics, imbuing it with his own personal perspective. His account illuminates the past but, at the same time, looks toward the future of the long struggle by African American scholars to use knowledge as a base of power in the fight against racism and white supremacy.

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico. Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana. Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of the northern Gulf Coast’s shrimp industry to the present. Coastal Louisiana’s historic connection to the Pacific Rim endures. Not only does the region continue to export dried shrimp to Asian markets domestically and internationally, but since 2000 the region’s large Vietnamese immigrant population has increasingly dominated Louisiana’s fresh shrimp harvest. Louisiana shrimp constitute the American gold standard of raw seafood excellence. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, cheap imports are forcing the nation’s domestic shrimp industry to rediscover its economic roots. “Fresh off the boat” signs and real-time internet connections with active trawlers are reestablishing the industry’s ties to local consumers. Direct marketing has opened the industry to middle-class customers who meet the boats at the docks. This “right off the boat” paradigm appears to be leading the way to reestablishment of sustainable aquatic resources. All-one-can-eat shrimp buffets are not going to disappear, but the Louisiana shrimp industry’s fate will ultimately be determined by discerning consumers’ palates.

Raif Shwayri begins his family's story with his grandfather Habib Shwayri's arrival at Ellis Island in 1902. Having left Beirut, then a harbor city on the Syrian coast of the Ottoman Empire, only weeks before, he took the name Alfred Nicola and made his way to relatives in New Orleans. There, he began peddling down the Bayou Lafourche, befriending the communities living alongside the water and earning the nickname "Sweet Papa" for his kindness and generosity. When he returned home to Lebanon in 1920, he invested the money he had made, from years of peddling, in real estate and died a wealthy man in 1956. After his death, his youngest son, Nadim (Raif's father), turned his part of the inheritance into an endowment that started Al-Kafaàt, an iconic and unique institution in Lebanon that serves the handicapped and underprivileged. Alfred Nicola's story, like the story of Lebanon itself, begins farther back in history. In its account of centuries of Ottoman rule, decades of colonial occupation, and years of internal political strife and civil war, Beirut on the Bayou intertwines a family narrative with the story of a people, of Lebanon in the making. From the Fertile Crescent that was Syria to the Crescent City that is New Orleans, the saga of the Shwayri family reflects the experiences of those Lebanese who walked the path of immigration to the United States, as well as those who stayed behind—or returned—to help forge a nation.