Digital Commons Network^™

The Plagues Of Colonialism: Representations Of Suffering In The Colonial And Postcolonial Francophone Algerian Novel From 1950-1966, Benjamin Jack Sparks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The indigenous Francophone Algerian novel dates from the early 1950s and since then has been a political manifestation of uneasiness. The anticolonial undertones of this literature demonstrate the sufferings and harsh realities of life under an oppressive colonial regime; meanwhile the postcolonial novel continues the representation of this suffering through the residual effects of colonialism and the impact of the bloody decolonization war. This dissertation contributes to the discourse regarding suffering as a result of French colonial oppression in light of François Hollande’s official recognition of the trauma of colonialism and the acceptance of the events from 1954-1962 as a …

Scholarship On All Scales, Zach Isenhower

Civil War Book Review

The air is cool (though some of our readers will rightfully scoff at my saying so in Baton Rouge), classrooms are full, and our bookshelves are full of exciting new titles. The signs are all here. To paraphrase the tagline of a popular television show, the Winter issue has come. This issue’s ....

Soldiers In The Army Of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, The Civil War's First African American Combat Unit, Greg Jones

Civil War Book Review

Fighting for Survival and Freedom in the West

Ian Michael Spurgeon's Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The First Kansas Colored, the Civil War's First African American Combat Unit provides some fantastic insights into an under-investigated aspect of the Civil War. Not only does the ....

Thunder On The River: The Civil War In Northeast Florida, James Denham

Civil War Book Review

Emerging Slavery Economy and Disruption in Civil War Florida

Dan Schafer, professor emeritus at the University of North Florida, brings a lifetime of research to this well written, fast-pasted narrative of the Civil War in Northeast Florida. Most of his previous scholarly work has been di....

The Civil War In The Border South, Mark M. Carroll

Civil War Book Review

Conflicted Loyalties and Postwar Identities in the Border South

This important book explores the Civil War in four key slaveholding Border States, the first monograph of its kind since Edward Conrad Smith’s The Borderland in the Civil War (1927). Phillips, an accomplished specialist....

The Southern Exodus To Mexico: Migration Across The Borderlands After The American Civil War, Matthew M. Stith

Civil War Book Review

Remaking Economic Fates in the Mexican Borderlands

In The Southern Exodus to Mexico, Todd W. Wahlstrom provides a nuanced, cogently argued, and well-researched story about the nearly five thousand former Confederates who migrated to Mexico following the Civil War. Most scholars ackn....

The Gray Fox: George Crook And The Indian Wars, Samuel Watson

Civil War Book Review

A Controversial General in the Formative Days of Army Irregular Warfare Strategy

This is the second volume in what Paul Magid projects as a trilogy on General George Crook. The first volume, From the Redwoods to Appomattox (Oklahoma, 2011), examined Crook’s career in antebellum Cal....

Engineering Victory: The Union Siege Of Vicksburg, Jeff T. Giambrone

Civil War Book Review

Digging, Not Starving out Vicksburg’s Defenders

Many books have been written about the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, but few of them have spent more than a few pages explaining the Union engineering effort that made the Federal victory possible. This oversight has been ably corrected by Justin....

Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns Of The Civil War, Zachery A. Fry

Civil War Book Review

An Authoritative Volume on the War’s Closing Campaigns

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is now in the books (so to speak), providing winded readers a chance to digest the smorgasbord of literature that publishers have recently offered scholars and enthusiasts. In addition to academic....

The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding The Black Flag In History, Memory, And Myth, Ralph Mann

Civil War Book Review

Revising Old Narratives of Guerrilla Warfare during the Civil War

This very valuable collection builds from the foundational works by Michael Fellman, Inside War (1989), and Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict (2009). It aims, as the editors explain, to contextualize Fel....

Sixteenth-Century Soil Carbon Sequestration Rates Based On Mexican Land-Grant Documents, Andrew Sluyter, Richard Hunter

Faculty Publications

A significant gap in our understanding of global change involves the linkages between historical land-use and land-cover change (LULCC), Holocene terrestrial carbon (C) pool fluxes, and climate change. To address that research problem, this method uses land grants for sheep ranches awarded in early colonial (1521–1620 CE) Mexico to quantify the amount of land converted from cropland to pastureland. Soil is the largest terrestrial C pool, and converting cropland to pastureland significantly increases soil C sequestration rates, thereby reducing atmospheric C. The land grants and associated archival documents contain location-specific information about soils, vegetation, hydrology, and other variables that make …

African Fire Cultures, Cattle Ranching, And Colonial Landscape Transformations In The Neotropics, Andrew Sluyter, Chris Duvall

Faculty Publications

Fire regimes emerge partly from human activities that reflect cultural-ecological knowledge of the relationships among fire, vegetation, grazing, climate, and other variables, as well as social relations. More knowledge of such “fire cultures,” past and present, therefore remains necessary to better understand the causes and persistent consequences of landscape burning. In the neotropics, people have used fire for centuries to manage livestock pastures. Conventional wisdom has long posited that such practices derived solely from antecedent European and indigenous, Native American fire cultures. Analysis of accounts of rangeland burning from throughout the neotropics during colonial times, however, demonstrates that ranchers incorporated …

The West Point History Of The Civil War, Jennifer M. Murray

Civil War Book Review

An Impressive New Narrative from the United States Military Academy

Established in 1802 by President Thomas Jefferson, the United States Military Academy, in West Point, New York, stands among the world’s preeminent educational and military institutions. A proud, distinguished institution....

Cofeeding Intra- And Interspecific Transmission Of An Emerging Insect-Borne Rickettsial Pathogen, Lisa D. Brown, Rebecca C. Christofferson, Kaikhushroo H. Banajee, Fabio Del Piero, Lane D. Foil, Kevin R. Macaluso

Faculty Publications

© 2015 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Cat fleas (Ctenocephalides felis) are known as the primary vector and reservoir of Rickettsia felis, the causative agent of flea-borne spotted fever; however, field surveys regularly report molecular detection of this infectious agent from other blood-feeding arthropods. The presence of R. felis in additional arthropods may be the result of chance consumption of an infectious bloodmeal, but isolation of viable rickettsiae circulating in the blood of suspected vertebrate reservoirs has not been demonstrated. Successful transmission of pathogens between actively blood-feeding arthropods in the absence of a disseminated …

Civil War Sesquicentennial: A Cwbr Retrospective, Zach Isenhower

Civil War Book Review

The past few years of the Civil War’s Sesquicentennial have produced a mountain of exciting works that improve our understanding of the United States’ period of deepest crisis. Civil War Book Review has done its part by keeping our readers up to date on the latest scholarship with our Sesqui....

Economies Of Violence, John Protevi

Faculty Publications

I discuss "economies of violence," comparing non-state (acephalic forager bands and horticultural chiefdoms) and state societies. Capital punishment and tolerated personal revenge in forager bands is both anti-war and anti-state, while some chiefdoms practice war as an anti-state practice.

Civil War Sesquicentennial: Unfurling The Black Flag In Civil War History, Christopher Phillips

Civil War Book Review

Fifteen years have passed since Daniel E. Sutherland unfurled the black flag and declared the guerrilla conflict in the Civil War a “sideshow no longer." Long seen as a product of aberrant individualism, a legacy of frontier conflicts, or a facet of southern cultural violence (interpretive tropes p....

Sherman's Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, And The American Way Of War, Garrett Mckinnon

Civil War Book Review

Evaluating Sherman’s Influence on Modern American Warfare

Matthew Carr’s Sherman’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War examines William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive military career and its supposed influence on post-Civil War American warfare. A journalist who....

Postsouthern Melancholia: Revising The Region In The Twenty-First Century, Matthew Dischinger

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Postsouthern Melancholia offers a new way of conceptualizing the elusive concept of melancholia through contemporary fiction, particularly fiction of or about the American South. Critics have long discussed national literature through the lens of melancholia: an unceasing attachment to a lost object or ideal that a subject or culture internalizes. My project positions melancholia as a literary strategy—one that contemporary southern fiction frequently contests and critiques. I read fiction that has been called “postsouthern,” a term applied to texts that reassess the bedrock concepts of southern literature such as community, storytelling, and sense of place. While much scholarship has focused …

A Performer's Guide To Ivor Gurney's The Western Playland (And Of Sorrow), Ridley Chauvin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this document is to serve as a performance guide for Ivor Gurney’s song cycle, The Western Playland (and of Sorrow), a song cycle for baritone, piano and string quartet, consisting of eight songs set to the poetry of A. E. Housman. Within this performance guide an analysis of each song and poem in The Western Playland (and of Sorrow) will be explored, along with performance recommendations for each of the eight songs. Given that there were relatively few composers writing works for string quartet, piano and solo voice during the years Ivor Gurney was composing, the author …

The Pope And The Presidents: The Italian Unification And The American Civil War, Robert Attilio Matteucci, Jr.

LSU Master's Theses

The American Civil War and the Italian Unification occurred simultaneously, and the major parties involved – the American government, the Confederacy, the Italian state, and the still-independent Papal States – interacted with each other on numerous occasions. The revolutionaries of the Risorgimento served as promising recruits for the Union’s armies, especially Garibaldi himself, although only Italians already in America actually fought. Italy would receive ironclad warships from the wartime United States. Those actions, however, alienated the Papal States from the North, presenting the Confederacy a diplomatic opportunity. The positive position of Catholicism in the South permitted the Confederacy to act …

Mortuary Practices And Social Identity At Matrix 101, La Leche Valley, Peru, Jenna Renee Hurtubise

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis focuses on the social identity of the individuals buried at a Late Middle Sicán (A.D. 1050-1120) mass grave designated Matrix 101. Matrix 101 is located in the Great Plaza of the Pomac forest archaeological complex in the La Leche Valley, north coast of Peru. My objectives are threefold: (1) to understand the social identities of the individuals, (2) to examine the complex mortuary practices that took place during the construction of the burial, and (3) to infer socio-political reasons for the construction of Matrix 101 and to see how they might relate to the Sicán societal collapse. Initial …

British Masculinity And Propaganda During The First World War, Evan M. Caris

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to address how the issue of masculinity functioned in British propaganda during the First World War, and how it affected individuals. Propaganda relied on prewar conceptions of masculinity to appeal to audiences for reasons such as enlistment or continued support for the war. Propaganda often amplified these conceptions of prewar masculinity, and men would internalize propaganda’s message. The British state, however, did not create propaganda uniformly, and there existed major differences between the goals of propaganda posters and propaganda films. It will be demonstrated that posters and film addressed separate issues despite reaching similar …

Political Conspiracy In Napoleonic France, Kelly Diane Jernigan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

An in-depth analysis of primary source material indicates that the conspiracies hatched against Napoleon served as the impetus for his decision to change the government from the Consulate to the Empire. His ambitious personality drove him to achieve as much power and prestige for himself as possible, a point discussed by numerous historians, but the conspiratorial actions designed to strike him down provided the opportunity. He was a master of manipulating situations—and people—in order to achieve his ambitious goals. Knowing that his constituents worried over renewed political turmoil if something happened to him, Napoleon used their fears to strengthen his …

Investigating Prehistoric Exchange In New Zealand: Portable Xrf And Spatial Analysis Of South Island Obsidian, Herman Nick Robles

LSU Master's Theses

The Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand currently houses a collection of obsidian artifacts that were once in the possession of ancestral South Island Maori. Although the stone artifacts that reside in the Otago Museum are known to have been collected mostly in the South Island of the New Zealand archipelago, there is not much information as to where the ancestors of South Island Maori originally obtained the raw material to create the stone artifacts. Using portable x-ray florescence (XRF) analysis to non-destructively geochemically characterize the obsidian, a study was performed on the collection of stone artifacts to provide a …

Reporting For The State Department: Carl W. Ackerman's Cooperation With Government During Wwi, Meghan Elizabeth Menard

LSU Master's Theses

The press was outraged when reports in 1973 exposed the CIA’s use of American journalists as undercover informants during the Cold War. The CIA-journalists link represented for the press a shocking break in the traditional line between journalists and government. A study of journalist Carl W. Ackerman’s experiences in the First World War suggests, however, that the CIA-journalists link has historical precedents in the practices of twentieth-century reporters. Ackerman, who later became the first dean of Columbia Journalism School, sent confidential reports to the State Department while reporting overseas for magazines and newspapers. He forged close relationships with a number …

Non-Detection Probability Of Diffusing Targets In The Presence Of A Moving Searcher, Pani W Fernando, Sivaguru S Sritharan

Communications on Stochastic Analysis

No abstract provided.

Islam In France And Germany: A Comparative Study Of The Immigrant Religion’S Experience In The State Sphere, Kristen Callais

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The “Arab Spring” In The Discourse Of The Western Media, Logan De La Barre-Hayes

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War On The Border, Matthew Hernando

Civil War Book Review

Current State of Kansas-Missouri Border Studies

Anthologies of scholarly essays are notorious in academic circles, both for the often indifferent quality of the work presented, and for having a paltry rationale for assembling and publishing them in the first place. In Bleeding Kansas, ....