Tough Times for LSU Press

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 linchpin 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!

We've been talking a lot of late about tough times in the legal academy and tough times for university presses in particular.  (You may recall our discussion back in February of the University of Michigan's shift towards e-monographs).

Comments

[Marc Roark]

They also published Twelve Years a Slave -- one of the best period pieces of the antebellum era.

[Alfred]

The list of great LSU titles goes on and on .... I meant to mention one of my most recent favorites, Eva Sheppard Wolf's Race and Liberty in the New Nation, which is a based on an extensive study of petitions regarding slavery to the Virginia legislature. It's a great way to gauge popular attitudes, both pro- and anti- slavery. And the final chapter is the best I've ever read on the response to Nat Turner's rebellion. Really clarifies a lot of what happened in the wake of that tragedy.

http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/bookPages/9780807131947.html

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