LSU Libraries blogs

Recent Posts

• Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by Gabe
  Richard Follett of the University of Sussex announced completion of Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917. Sources housed in the LSU Libraries' Special Collections were amongst those consulted for the project. For additional sugar resources in Special Collections, please consult our online catalog and our "Sugar" subject guide. Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917 Documenting Louisiana Sugar provides historians and social scientists with an innovative tool for examining plantation economy and agrarian society in the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns and additional census records, Documenting Louisiana Sugar makes available two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and macro detail the evolution of one of America's definitive plantation crops, namely cane sugar. These can be freely accessed at www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar For over seventy years, agrarian economists in Louisiana diligently recorded economic and production data on each sugar producing estate. These remarkable records provide an unbroken time series of data; indeed, no other plantation crop in the American South was so meticulously recorded for such a long period of time as was Louisiana sugar. This project makes these sources available for rigorous analysis and provides users with the query functions capable of tracing people and plantations through time. It enables users to study the economic performance of an entire industry, to consider business consolidation, capital acquisition, technology transfer, and the shifting dynamics of plantation land use. The built in search functions enable researchers to limit or expand their enquiries by year, parish, crop output, technology, and even gender. Users can track persistence and change among the plantation elite, trace landholding and economic performance among both large and small cane farmers, examine the effect of the American Civil War, and assess the transition from slave to free labor on Louisiana's plantation economy. And for those interested in the late nineteenth century, the databases track the rise and fall of American sugar during U.S. imperial expansion. No other public database detailing plantation life in such detail exists and we hope that scholars find this resource to be a valuable research tool. Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described Louisiana's sugar country as a "life of living death." These databases do not tell the story of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who labored in the cane fields through the nineteenth century, but they tell the story of an industry where the exploitation of land, capital, and labor was central to business success. Funding for this project was made available by research project grants awarded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by the University of Sussex and the University of Toronto. The image used above is from the LSU Photograph Collection.... Read More >
• MAC / SAFARI USERS CANNOT ACCESS SCIENCE DIRECT ARTICLES
  from by jryan1
  A problem with the current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader prevents Macs users with Safari from ScienceDirect PDF articles. ScienceDirect has reported this problem to Adobe and Safari. Until it is fixed: * Hold the control button, click on the PDF link and select "download link to disk." Save the file to the hard drive and view it from there. OR * Use Mozilla Firefox instead of Safari, which does not seem to have this problem.... Read More >
• MAC / SAFARI USERS CANNOT ACCESS SCIENCE DIRECT ARTICLES
  from by jryan1
  A problem with the current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader prevents Macs users with Safari from ScienceDirect PDF articles. ScienceDirect has reported this problem to Adobe and Safari. Until it is fixed: * Hold the control button, click on the PDF link and select "download link to disk." Save the file to the hard drive and view it from there. OR * Use Mozilla Firefox instead of Safari, which does not seem to have this problem.... Read More >
• 
  from by jryan1
  ... Read More >
• After Katrina
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by lwood
  "Madonna of Desire" by Donn YoungIn commemoration of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, LSU Libraries' Special Collections presents “After Katrina,” an exhibition on display July 21 – September 27, 2008 in Hill Memorial Library on the LSU campus. The exhibition features images salvaged from the studio of New Orleans photographer Donn Young in the weeks following the flooding accompanying Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Young’s compelling post-storm photos of the Crescent City round out the exhibition, which is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “40 Days and 40 Nights” on display at the Louisiana State Archives. Young will give a lecture open to the public in Hill during September. For more information, visit the Special Collections exhibitions page at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/exhibits/index.html.... Read More >
• What do Charles Darwin, Ulysses S. Grant and Mardi Gras have in common?
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by mltaylor
  Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana are almost always tinged with political and social satire. President Bush, Governor Jindal, and even Britney Spears -- these are just a few of the names that have inspired colorful floats and costumes in recent years. In 1873, New Orleans' famous Mystick Krewe of Comus took their inspiration from none other than the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who had recently published On the Origin of Species, a highly controversial book in which Darwin presented his theory of natural selection.Dressed as everything from mice to monkeys, the members of the krewe paraded through the streets of the city. A poem, in imitation of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, was painted on transparencies and carried along by the revelers. The real butt of the joke, however, was the Republican Party, not Darwin. The city police, which supported the GOP and its plan for reconstruction of the post-Civil War South, wasn't amused. As the parade tried to cross Canal Street, the police put an end to it.Nevertheless, that didn't prevent the publication of a small book to commemorate the event. Now part of the Irby C. Nichols Papers at the LSU Libraries and entitled The Missing Links to Darwin's Origin of Species, the book contains over a dozen cartoons of strange creatures, half man, half beast. Some of the characters are identifiable. Ulysses S. Grant, for example, has been crossed with a caterpillar and lounges on a leaf smoking a cigar. General Benjamin Butler, the despised commander of the Union army in New Orleans during the Civil War, is shown in another cartoon dining with a party of bears and hyenas. Members of the notoriously corrupt metropolitan police are depicted throughout the book as sundry slithering animals. Such men, the poem suggests, were fit subjects for Darwin's investigations as well as proof that he was right -- men are descended from apes! Just look at the people who are running our city!This post is the first in a new category on the Special Collections blog, the Cabinet of Curiosities. Need a subject for research? Take a peek into the Cabinet! Descriptions of especially ususual or interesting items that could form the basis of a research paper will be posted here.-- Michael Taylor... Read More >
• New book acquisitions
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by mltaylor
  LSU Special Collections recently acquired two unusual bilingual texts. The first is a so-called “artist’s book” -- a work of art that is bound like a book and in which text and image are merged. Designed by the French artist Bertrand Dorny, the book contains a short poem, Bilingue, written in French and English by the experimental writer Michel Butor. The poem and images describe a flight across the Atlantic during which travelers’ conversations blend together, “a spiral up the wand of Mercury” (the Roman god famous for flying from place to place in the blink of an eye). Although artists’ books (or livres d’artistes) are primarily a twentieth-century innovation, the form is often said to have originated with the English poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827). Artists' books are typically produced in very small editions. Only ten copies of Bilingue, for example, were produced.A related acquisition that also merges text, image, and mythology is Les Traits de l’Histoire Universelle (1761) by Jean-Louis Aubert, an eighteenth-century French dramatist, poet and essayist. The work contains selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in French and Latin and over 120 engravings illustrating the verses. An outstanding example of an early educational text illustrated for children, this book was also intended “for the instruction or amusement of persons of all ages and of all sexes.” The Grimm brothers, however, didn’t think the stories would be of much interest to adults; Voltaire, on the other hand, supposedly enjoyed them.... Read More >
• Early Bird Project
  from by jryan1
  LSU Researchers Help Decode Evolutionary History of Birds The full text of the Science article can be found here.... Read More >
• New Digital Library Collection: Louisiana Ecology and Conservation: the Percy Viosca Jr. Collection
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by Gabe
  Take a look at this visual record of the state’s natural resources and history. Louisiana Ecology and Conservation: the Percy Viosca Jr. Collection is a collection of images by one of Louisiana’s most acclaimed biologists and conservationists. The images presented in the digital library offer a range of subjects such as documentation of his biological science and conservation work, the Mississippi River flood of 1927, and images of his work with the Boy Scouts of America. The collection includes more than 1,100 images by Percy Viosca. These images were scanned by the staff of Hill Memorial Library after being salvaged by Louisiana Sea Grant and the LSU AgCenter Extension. For more information about this project and the work of Percy Viosca, Jr., visit the project website. To view the collection, visit the LOUISiana Digital Library. ... Read More >
• Hans Sloane and his Bookplate
  from LSU Libraries Special Collections by mltaylor
  Bookplates are generally good ways of tracing the provenance, or previous ownership, of a book. Sometimes, however, they can be misleading, and researchers should be careful not to jump to conclusions.A book from the LSU Libraries’ McIlhenny Natural History Collection illustrates this point. Inside the cover of John Ray’s Wisdom of the Works of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1756) is a bookplate with the name “Hans Sloane, Esqr.” printed on it. One might assume that the book belonged to Sir Hans Sloane, the famous natural history collector whose bequest of books and artifacts formed the foundation of the British Museum. (Sloane is also famous for having “invented” milk chocolate, the recipe for which was later adopted by John Cadbury, founder of the Cadbury chocolate company).There’s just one problem: Sir Hans died in 1753—three years before this book was published.A quick look at the Dictionary of National Biography reveals that Sir Hans had a son, also named Hans; unfortunately, the child died in infancy. However, an inquiry to the Sloane Printed Books Project at the British Library, which is trying to recreate Sloane’s library (many books from which were sold in duplicate sales in the 19th century), reveals that Sloane had a great-nephew, also named Hans, who used a bookplate. Given the 1756 printing date of LSU’s copy of Ray’s sermons, the book must have belonged to Sir Hans’ great-nephew rather than to Sir Hans himself.At least one other U.S. library with a book bearing the bookplate shown above has identified it as being from the library of Sir Hans. Bibliographers beware! Hans Sloane, Esq., and Sir Hans Sloane were not one and the same.-- Michael Taylor... Read More >

All Blogs (7 total)

• Library Systems
• listen up!
• LSU Libraries
• LSU Libraries Outreach
• LSU Libraries Special Collections

Log In