Southern History
What Became of Dr. Smith
Nominee for the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Visual Arts
Artist Noah Saterstrom (b. 1974) grew up aware of a mystery in his family’s story. No living relatives knew what had h ...
They Called Us River Rats
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded ...
Beyond Control
Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During the great flood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath the ...
Outliving the White Lie
Nominee for the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Nonfiction
Part history, part memoir, Outliving the White Lie: A Southerner’s Historical, Genealogical, and Personal Journey charts ...
A Trumpet around the Corner
Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of ...
Drilling Ahead
The discovery of oil in Tinsley, Mississippi, in 1939 captivated the South and has deeply affected the region ever since. At the end of 1940, over 133 wells were flowing, and speculators were drilling ...
Rowdy Boundaries
Dwelling along the Mississippi River, the Tennessee state line, the Tenn-Tom Waterway, and the Gulf of Mexico are a trove of characters with fascinating lives and histories. In Rowdy Boundaries: True ...
Wading In
Wading In: Desegregation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast frames the fight for beach and school desegregation within the history of Black life in Biloxi, beginning with the arrival of slave ships on the Gulf ...
Finding Myself Lost in Louisiana
Winner of the 2024 Summerlee Book Prize for Nonfiction
In Finding Myself Lost in Louisiana, author Keagan LeJeune brilliantly weaves the unusual folklore, landscape, and history of Louisiana along with ...
Love Letter from Pig
In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this ...