Product Description: The Enigmatic South brings together leading scholars of the Civil War period to challenge existing perceptions of the advance to secession, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The pioneering research and innovative arguments of these historians bring crucial insights to the study of this era in American history...read more

Product Description: General Halbert Eleazer Paine, commanding officer of the 4th Wisconsin Regiment of Volunteers, took part in most of the significant military actions in the lower Mississippi Valley during the Civil War. Nearly forty years after the conflict's end, Paine -- a former schoolteacher and attorney who would become a three-term congressman -- penned recollections of his wartime exploits, including his involvement in the Vicksburg campaign, the operations that resulted in the capture of New Orleans, the Battle of Baton Rouge, the Bayou Teche offensive, and the siege of Port Hudson...read more

Louisiana’s Florida Parishes eight modern-day parishes located in the southeastern portion of the state endured a tumultuous evolution, including domination by every major power that invaded North America, exclusion from the Louisiana Purchase, insurrection and the establishment of the original Lone Star Republic, and some of the highest rates of rural homicide recorded in American history. The area was long neglected by scholars until some of its foremost experts came together to explore and celebrate its singular identity. A Fierce and Fractious Frontier, edited by Samuel C. Hyde Jr., is a result of that collaboration and consists of ten essays on the history and culture of this unique territory from its colonial periods through the twentieth century. Revealing the difficulties of the past and suggesting considerations for the future of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, this volume will stand as a model for the emerging field of southern subregional studies.

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In the nineteenth-century South, there existed numerous local pockets where cultures and values different from those of the dominant planter class prevailed. One such area was the Florida parishes of southeastern Louisiana, where peculiar conditions combined to create an enclave of white yeomen. In the years after the Civil War, levels of violence among these men escalated to create a state of chronic anarchy, producing an enduring legacy of bitterness and suspicion. In Samuel C. Hyde's careful and original study of a society that degenerated into utter chaos, he illuminates the factors that allowed these conditions to arise and triumph.Early in the century, the Florida parishes were characterized by an exceptional level of social and political turmoil. Stability emerged as the cotton economy expanded into the piney-woods parishes during the 1820s and 1830s, bringing with it slaves and prosperity -- but also bringing increasing dominance of the region by a powerful planter elite that shaped state government to suit its purposes.By the early 1840s, Jacksonian political rhetoric inspired a newfound assertiveness among the common folk. With the construction of a railroad through the piney-woods region at the close of the antebellum period and the collapse of the planter class at the end of the Civil War, the plain folk were finally able to reject the planters' authority. Traditional patterns of political and economic stability were permanently disrupted, and the residents -- their Jeffersonian traditions now corrupted by the brutal war and Reconstruction periods -- rejected all governance and resorted increasingly to violence as the primary solution to conflict. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, the Florida Parishes had some of the highest murder rates in the country.In Pistols and Politics, Hyde gives serious scrutiny to a region heretofore largely neglected by historians, integrating the anomalies of one area of Louisiana into the history of the state and the wider South. He reassesses the prevailing myth of poverty in the piney woods, portrays the conscious methods of the ruling planter elite to manipulate the common people, and demonstrates the destructive possibilities inherent in the area's political traditions as well as the complex mores, values, and dynamics of a society that produced some of the fiercest and most enduring feuds in American history. (view table of contents)

In 1949, Frank Owsley's seminal work, PLAIN FOLK IN THE OLD SOUTH, argued that a thriving middle class represented the majority of southerners and was integral to the region's development. In the spirit of Owsley's effort to expand understanding of the south, the selections included here provide fresh perspectives on the complexities of the plain folk culture. 4 line drawings . (view table of contents)