"American scholarship is richer for this unique exercise. More important-the great community, . . . one again sorely beset by unsettled problems of sectional rivalry and world tension, can read this book with great profit. Too few historians put their talents at the disposal of society so effectively." -American Historical Review "A brilliant, straightforward summary of the background of America's favorite armchair war. So deceptively simple is Craven's] exposition that the solid worth of the book sneaks up on the reader when, having finished it, he realizes that the brief volume may be...

Rachel O'Connor was an extraordinary woman. For nearly fifty years (from 1797 to 1846), she lived on a plantation near Bayou Sara in Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish. And for twenty-five of those years, after the death of her husband, she managed the plantation alone. Although they had, as she said, "begun poor", at the time of her death she owned about a thousand acres and seventy-five slaves. Not a biography in the conventional sense, Avery O. Craven's charming book is rather the story of Rachel and the Louisiana in which she lived. Based largely on several hundred of her letters, it tells...