Since Louisiana is the only state in the union to organize itself through parishes and not counties, it should come as no surprise that its places of worship are pillars of its communities. The Big Easy is no exception. From New Orleans to the Northshore, stately churches, grand cathedrals and rustic chapels act as reliquaries and safeguards of community history and strength. The stories of their builders, architects and leaders exemplify development and the immigrant experience in Louisiana. Their parishioners embody the diverse and personal meanings of faith and devotion. Join Deborah Burst as she explores the rich history of churches of New Orleans.

New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards showcases over three hundred vintage postcard images of the city, printed in glorious color. From popular tourist attractions, restaurants, and grand hotels to local businesses, banks, churches, neighborhoods, civic buildings, and parks, the book not only celebrates these cards’ visual beauty but also considers their historic value. After providing an overview of the history of postcards in New Orleans, Matthew Griffis expertly arranges and describes the postcards by subject or theme. Focusing on the period from 1900 to 1920, the book is the first to offer information about the cards’ many publishers. More than a century ago, people sent postcards like we make phone calls today. Many also collected postcards, even trading them in groups or clubs. Adorned with colorized views of urban and rural landscapes, postcards offered people a chance to own images of places they lived, visited, or merely dreamed of visiting. Today, these relics remain one of the richest visual records of the last century as they offer a glimpse at the ways a city represented itself. They now appear regularly in art exhibits, blogs, and research collections. Many of the cards in this book have not been widely seen in well over a century, and many of the places and traditions they depict have long since vanished.

As the South reels following the Civil War, a group of survivors unite to rebuild a school in Tennessee. Over the next twenty years, they will navigate Reconstruction politics and social upheaval to found the University of the South. Told from eight perspectives—freed slaves, Confederate veterans, widows, students—These Hallowed Halls is an epic saga about building a university that has lasted for generations. Founded in 1860 by Episcopal Clergy, the school's mission of providing an education to Southern elites is destroyed along with the rest of planter society in the ensuing war. The Confederate veterans who seek to rebuild must struggle against their fellow soldiers who wish to turn the school into a Southern West Point. Meanwhile, the freed slaves struggle to maintain their newfound rights against the Old South as they help rebuild. Widows seek a second chance at life by running boarding houses while students come to grips with impact war has brought on their parents. Between them all they must discover a new identity that does not involve slavery. Set during one of the most turbulent times in American history, These Hallowed Halls is a work of historical fiction set in Reconstruction South.

Offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all. Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974-94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates. Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been developed and disseminated. The contributors emphasize how ideas of “the South” have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.

How do I get out of here? So begins John Dillenberger's account of his journey from a small Illinois farm overlooking the Mississippi to Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Drew, San Francisco Theological Seminary, and ultimately the presidencies of the Graduate Theological Union and Hartford Seminary. Along the way, he served as a colleague of such notable scholars as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. From Fallow Fields to Hallowed Halls is at once an account of the unfolding of a life and a picture of academic and cultural religious currents of the twentieth century. John Dillenberger was shaped by the times that he also shaped at critical junctures.

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician. The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.