Academic

Tough Times for LSU Press

By Alfred Brophy

This news from the Chronicle that LSU Press may lose its funding from the LSU system (which is in the neighborhood of $100,000 per year) is particularly hard because I was reading an LSU Press book at lunch today (Michael Johnson's quantitative study of the secession movement in Georgia, Towards a Patriarchal Republic).  By the way, Johnson's book is a really fabulous linking of election data with qualitative evidence around Georgia's critical secession decision.  LSU is one of the great presses for southern history.  They've published, among many other treasures, some of my most favorite works in southern history, including Drew Faust's The Creation of Confederate Nationalism and her James Henry Hammond and the Design for Mastery and The Ideology of Slavery, as well as Craven's Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (a lynch pin of LSU's Southern History series, which also included C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South).  LSU Press is, in short, a national treasure.  Details on the many prizes that LSU books have won are here--including the amazing sales (2 million) for A Confederacy of Dunces!

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 07, 2009 (boomark / email).