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The Political Transformation Of David Tod: Governing Ohio During The Height Of The Civil War, Joseph Ricci

Civil War Book Review

While studies of President Abraham Lincoln, as well as his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, and their military generals have dominated Civil War literature, rarely has attention to the politics of the war extended beyond the executive office. Joseph Lambert Jr.’s The Political Transformation of David Tod examines an often-overlooked facet of the political history of the Civil War – the governorship of loyal states. Few historians have ventured into this aspect of the political history of the war.

A Brief Moment In The Sun: Francis Cardozo And Reconstruction In South Carolina, Alexander Wing

Civil War Book Review

Neil Kinghan offers an intriguing biography of Francis Cardozo, the first African American to hold statewide office after the Civil War. As secretary of state, and later treasurer of South Carolina, Kinghan reevaluates Cardozo’s historical significance as an instrumental figure in the postwar reconstruction of the state. The primary aim of this book is to “give [Cardozo] the recognition he deserves and restore his place in African American history of the nineteenth century.” In so doing, Kinghan addresses the “still inadequate recognition of the achievements of the period and almost none of the contribution of Francis Cardozo.” The author uses …

Two Counties In Crisis: Measuring Political Change In Reconstruction Texas, Cameron Sauers

Civil War Book Review

Robert Dillard’s Two Counties in Crisis explores three decades of political culture in two divergent Texas counties. Collin County, a frontier county largely home to emigrants from other Southern states, is contrasted against Harrison County, a cotton growing county with 145 planters who each owned more than 20 enslaved peoples. Dillard claims that these counties, and Texas more broadly, did not neatly align with the political culture of the rest of the Confederacy. In a combination of political science and history, Dillard argues that a culture of backlash and resistance to federal authority defined Texas state politics in the Civil …

Onward To Chicago: Freedom Seekers And The Underground Railroad In Northeastern Illinois, Michelle Norello

Civil War Book Review

Larry A. McClellan, drawing on a breadth of archival sources, brings an invigorating narrative to freedom seekers in Northeastern Illinois. McClellan’s compelling account tells the “complex and deeply human stories of freedom seekers” while underscoring “that the Underground Railroad did not shape the movement of freedom seekers.” Rather, as McClellan contends, their movements “gave shape to what became the networks known as the Underground Railroad.”

American Catholics And The Quest For Equality In The Civil War Era, David Endres

Civil War Book Review

In American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era, Robert Emmett Curran argues that nineteenth-century America did not offer equal opportunities for Blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Catholics, and women. Curran, a professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University, focuses on Catholics’ pursuit of equality from 1846 to 1877, showcasing their transformation from “internal aliens” to full-fledged citizens, which did not prevent them from seeking to deprive others, especially African Americans, of the same.

"To The Manor Born", Jacob N. Long

Civil War Book Review

Matthew Speiser’s To The Manor Born is bold, but bold by the attempt alone. Speiser’s history where the American Civil War never ends is a work of fiction whose high-water mark is its own synopsis. Of course, same as anything in the world of imagination, Speiser’s America could have conceivably existed.

Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta And Then Got Written Out Of History, David J. Gerleman

Civil War Book Review

In Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History, Howell Raines seeks to publicize the story of loyal Alabamians who fought for the Union. The First Alabama Cavalry is little known, he argues, due to early twentieth century collusion between unreconstructed Alabama officials and an influential cabal of Lost Cause scholars trained by William Dunning at Columbia University.

The Lost President: A.D. Smith And The Hidden History Of Radical Democracy In Civil War America, Stephen Maizlish

Civil War Book Review

At the very outset of her deceptively titled book, Ruth Dunley admits that the subject of her biography, A.D. Smith, is a person of “secondary historical importance." Even so, she is drawn to him by the mystery involved in attempting to uncover his life story. Her journey of discovery, recounted in The Lost President, is a long and challenging one. Her persistence in pursuit of that story is impressive and unyielding. In the end, Dunley succeeds in uncovering a life dedicated to republicanism as a would-be president of Canada, a judge who declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, and a …

Soldier Of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, And The Redemption Of Ulysses S. Grant, Joshua Waddell

Civil War Book Review

In 1854, U.S. Army Captain Ulysses S. Grant underwent a demoralizing stretch in his military career. Following his service in the Mexican American War, the Army transferred Grant to the isolated Fort Humboldt in northern California. Separated from his wife, Julia, and their two children, Grant suffered intense bouts of loneliness and occasionally turned to alcohol for reprieve. Grant’s drinking eventually bled into his work, and his superior officer forced his resignation after Grant arrived at a pay meeting hungover. He returned home in shame, and many, including his father Jesse, had lost faith in him. Few would have expected …

The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists And The Struggle To Transform The Union, Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

Civil War Book Review

In The Abolitionist Civil War, Frank J. Cirillo offers a much-needed study of abolitionist activity during the Civil War. In twelve tightly chronological chapters, he highlights the ideas, interventions, and arguments of abolitionists from Secession Winter through May 1865. Cirillo focuses on ten abolitionists ranging from well-known figures William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to lesser-known folks such as George Cheever and Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster to the Virginia outlier Moncure Conway, and he sorts them into several fluctuating camps based on how they chose to engage with Civil War politics. Ultimately, he argues that in the majority’s wartime …

War, Politics, & Change, Kennon H. Keiser Jr.

Civil War Book Review

Historians have long documented the ways in which war and politics bring about social, economic, and cultural change. Nowhere is this more evident than during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The war devastated the South; it upended the system of chattel slavery and instigated remarkable transformations to the region’s demographics, political, and economic structures. Reconstruction emerged out of the ashes of war. This critical and hotly debated period redefined U.S. citizenship, expanded suffrage rights, and altered the relationship between the federal government and the states. Many of the lofty goals of Reconstruction, however, fell short as southern “Redeemers” regained …

Sand, Science, And The Civil War: Sedimentary Geology And Combat, Erin Stewart Mauldin

Civil War Book Review

Scott Hippensteel’s Sand, Science, and the Civil War fills

a critical gap in several different literatures on America’s Civil War. Across 20 brief chapters, Hippensteel demonstrates how sedimentary geology affected military operations on a range of scales, from the continental creation of mountains that acted as offensive obstacles to the weathering of sand into an effective force multiplier for coastal fortifications. Hippensteel is not a historian by training—he is an associate professor of earth sciences—and perhaps for that reason, Sand, Science, and the Civil War does not follow the expected structure or chronology of a typical history monograph. Nevertheless, Hippensteel’s …

Charleston And Savannah: The Rise, Fall, And Reinvention Of Two Rival Cities, Marissa Jenrich

Civil War Book Review

In Charleston and Savannah, planner and independent scholar Thomas D. Wilson builds upon ground laid by his earlier books to offer an insightful and comprehensive comparison of two of the Lowcountry’s most historic cities. In The Oglethorpe Plan (2015) and The Ashley Cooper Plan (2016), Wilson highlights how seventeenth and eighteenth-century urban planning helped shape the politics, economics, and culture of Savannah and Charleston, respectively, as well as how these early foundations continue to influence the experiences of city residents and visitors in our contemporary moment. The present volume extends the contributions of the author’s previous works, arguing that …

A New History Of The American South, Frank J. Byrne

Civil War Book Review

A New History of the American South is an ambitious collection of fifteen essays written by a range of distinguished scholars that explore the history of the region from its earliest inhabitants to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Broken into three roughly equal parts, the chapters proceed in chronological order. Editor W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s introduction deftly lays the foundation for the collection by grappling with the challenges even defining the region over time as well as introducing several of the themes that bind this collection into a coherent whole. These include the often-overlooked diversity across the South in terms …

Another Look: Animal Histories Of The Civil War Era, Henry Motty

Civil War Book Review

The chaos and suffering that swept through the United States during the Civil War affected not only humans—but also the animal world. In Animal Histories of the Civil War, a team of Civil War scholars argue how animal contributions, such as providing mobility, food, and companionship, not only impacted the way the war was fought, but also determined its outcome and the way it was remembered. Edited by Earl J. Hess, author of Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation and the former Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University, Animal Histories highlights the relationship and …

Environmental History In Focus, Kennon H. Keiser Jr.

Civil War Book Review

The book reviews in this winter 2024 issue of the Civil War Book Review emphasize the role of the environment during the Civil War Era. While our two feature essays take us out of the realm of environmental history and into the world of politics, the primary focus of this winter issue is the role of nature in history. In recent years, historians have added to our knowledge of the environment’s role in the past. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Civil War Era. As historian Stephen Berry explained, “Like the Columbian Exchange, the Civil War was a …

Civil War Treasures, Hans Rasmussen

Civil War Book Review

The Civil War Cartoon Album in the LSU Libraries Special Collections collectively forms a record of northern political humor about the South during the early days of the war when Yankees assumed their armies to be unbeatable and could not yet imagine the protracted conflict that the US Civil War ultimately became.

Scars On The Land: An Environmental History Of Slavery In The American South, Rich Newman

Civil War Book Review

In Scars on the Land, David Silkenat offers an authoritative and expansive treatment of slavery’s environmental impact on the American south. Based on a wide range of sources – from slave narratives to slaveholders’ reports on nature – and a deep reading of recent scholarship on early environmental reform, the rise of capitalism, and Black resistance to bondage, the book expertly examines the ecological transformation of southern landscapes between the colonial era and the Civil War.

The Key To The Shenandoah Valley: Geography And The Civil War Struggle For Winchester, Johnathan M. Ward

Civil War Book Review

The Key to the Shenandoah Valley offers a substantial military study of the topographical and environmental features surrounding the town of Winchester, Virginia during the Civil War. Edward McCaul focuses on six specific battles for control over the town of Winchester, but he examines these military struggles in a much larger context to indicate how the geography of the Valley was crucial to Civil War strategy. In so doing, he effectively combines environmental history, military history, and political history to reveal the importance of Winchester and its terrain.

Plants In The Civil War: A Botanical History, Logan S. Istre

Civil War Book Review

On occasion, there are historical topics so obvious in their significance that they remain overlooked for far too long. Such is the case of the role of plants during the American Civil War, and, fortunately, we have a remedy in Judith Sumner’s Plants in the Civil War: A Botanical History. Sumner, an experienced botanist specializing in ethnobotany–the study of human social interaction with plants–has followed on her past success with Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II to present a “plant-centered history of the Civil War.” As she notes, such a study is pertinent given …

A Look At Lincoln, Frank J. Williams

Civil War Book Review

The Lincoln Miracle focuses not on the iconic president but on the sophisticated tactics leading to his nomination at the Wigwam in Chicago over those fateful days. Amid today’s political environment, where the Republican party—at least regarding its higher ideals—appears dormant, Edward Achorn takes his readers back to that fateful moment in in the Civil War era, when the Republican party stood for progressive principles.

Empire Of Brutality: Enslaved People And Animals In The British Atlantic World, Owen Clow

Civil War Book Review

Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World, Christopher Michael Blakley’s first book and a revision of their 2019 dissertation, traces how British slaveowners distinguished between people, animals, and those persons who, through enslavement, occupied a position “in-between,” and how that process of dehumanization was molded by the material human-animal relationships that structured Atlantic slavery.

Interculturality, Creolization, And Globalization In "Ángeles Nómadas" By Minelys Sánchez, Cecily Bernard

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

A Pharmacological Approach To Investigating Effector Translocation In Rice-Magnaporthe Oryzae Interactions, Ely Oliveira-Garcia, Allison Jane Hamilton

Faculty Publications

Fungal pathogens deliver effector proteins into living plant cells to suppress plant immunity and control plant processes that are needed for infection. During plant infection, the devastating rice blast fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae, forms the specialized biotrophic interfacial complex (BIC), which is essential for effector translocation. Cytoplasmic effectors are first focally secreted into BICs, and subsequently packaged into dynamic membranous effector compartments (MECs), then translocated via clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) into the host cytoplasm. This study demonstrates that clathrin-heavy chain inhibitors endosidin-9 (ES9) and endosidin-9–17 (ES9–17) blocked the internalization of the fluorescently labeled effectors Bas1 and Pwl2 in rice cells, leading to …

Gumbo Yearbook, Class Of 2024, Louisiana State University And Agricultural And Mechanical College

Gumbo Yearbook

The Gumbo yearbook chronicles the entire academic year at LSU. In words and especially photos, the Gumbo shows the people, places, and events that make each year unique. In addition to formal portraits of schools and departments, the book contains hundreds of snapshots of students with their friends and dozens of pages showcasing organizations.

Biology, Ecology, And Management Of Redbanded Stink Bug (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), Olabimpe O. Okosun, Justin George, Maribel Portilla, James P. Glover, Katherine A. Parys, Gadi V.P. Reddy

Faculty Publications

The redbanded stink bug (RBSB), Piezodorus guildinii (Westwood) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) is an invasive stink bug species and a polyphagous pest of cultivated crops and non-cultivated wild plants. The increase in soybean cultivation during the 1960s-1970s led to the spread of RBSB as an economic pest of soybean throughout South America, especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In the early 2000s, RBSB became an economic concern to US agriculture and is currently a key species in a stink bug complex that damages soybean in many mid-southern states. RBSB causes extensive damage to soybeans and other economically important leguminous crops by feeding …

Understanding Inequality In U.S. Farm Subsidies Using Large-Scale Administrative Data, Jisang Yu, Sunghun Lim

Faculty Publications

Using a large-scale, individual-level administrative data set for 2008–2021, we document the inequality in farm program payments across all recipients in the U.S. By examining the relationship between within-county inequality and demographic characteristics of farmers in a county, we find that there is a positive association between the share of Black operators and within-county inequality. We also provide suggestive evidence that a substantial portion of racial and gender disparities in farm payments are associated with crop production characteristics. We then utilize name information in farm payment data to infer the race and gender of individual payees. The analysis using approximately …

Transgenic Sugarcane Expressing Bacillus Thuringiensis Cry1ac Protein Offers New Possibilities For Controlling The Giant Borer, Telchin Licus (Drury), A Pest Difficult To Control, Caroline Izabel R. Sakuno, Fabricio José B. Francischini, Karen Missy A. Komada, Murilo Basso, Fangneng Huang

Faculty Publications

The giant borer, Telchin licus (Drury), is an important insect pest of sugarcane in Central and South America. This pest is difficult to control with chemical or biological control approaches due to the larvae behavior of hiding in the deepest parts of the plants. Manual scavenging and skewer killing have been the main approaches for monitoring and control of T. licus in Brazil, the world's largest sugarcane producer. Recently, Brazil launched the first commercial use of transgenic sugarcane expressing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) proteins to control the sugarcane borer, Diatraea saccharalis (F.), a primary insect pest of sugarcane in the Americas. …

Madness As Response To Inherent Cultural Conflicts In Anglophone Fiction From 1700 To 2020, Anna Klambauer

Comparative Woman

Madness in literature has a long and colourful history. While its representation varies significantly in different literary periods, madness is nonetheless a consistent theme responding to inherent conflicts of civilisation. Thus, in the eighteenth-century novel, madness is subdued and forced to express itself in the language of rationality, while in the nineteenth century the theme becomes increasingly subversive. In the form of the madwoman trope (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), madness is simultaneously a reaction to restrictive patriarchal norms, and a frame in which the gender conflicts of the time can be safely and effectively played out. In the twentieth century, …

"Too Immoral To Be Narrated By A Woman": Censoring Erotic Fiction Of Arab Women Writers In Girls Of Riyadh And Distant View Of A Minaret And Other Stories, Muhammed Salem

Comparative Woman

In the Arab world, bargaining with censorship has been an ongoing struggle for writers, particularly female authors. How could we explain that only male writers were allowed to discuss sexuality in the Arabic canon, insofar as female characters are portrayed as passive sexual objects? Are Arab women writers victims of double censorship? One is imposed on their fellow male writers, and another is tacit censorship which judges women’s morality based on their writing. Girls of Riyadh (2007) by Saudi novelist, Rajaa Abdullah Alsanea, and Distant View of the Minaret and Other Stories (1987) by Egyptian novelist, Alifa Rifaat, are two …