Shreveport Chronicles

Here are heroes and scoundrels, businessmen and religious leaders, artists and soldiers, pioneers and plantersas well as a number of stories that are ironic, bizarre or simply curious. In this newest collection of his popular columns, Eric J. Brock portrays Shreveports historical pageant through the lives of a cross section of truly fascinating characters. From the enigmatic mayor Robert Nathaniel Wood to forgotten beauty queen Janet Currie, Brock sketches the men and womenboth ordinary and extraordinarywho shaped the course of Shreveport history. These biographical vignettes, originally printed in the Shreveport Times and the Forum News Magazine, are a must-read for any native or resident of northwest Louisiana.

The history of Shreveport's Cemetery and those that are known to be buried there.

Legendary Locals of Shreveport chronicles fascinating people who have made a difference in the Shreveport–Bossier City area. Some are good, some are bad, and more than a few are wicked. There are movie starlets, entertainers, decorated war veterans, gangsters, preachers, madams, politicians, giants of industry, and humble folk who rose to greatness or infamy. Shreveport began as a rough and tumble frontier town that came late to being “civilized.” A Baptist preacher shot one of Quantrill’s Raiders when he rode his horse into church during a Sunday service. The most famous madam in the region was also a suffragette. The first successful bankers in Shreveport were immigrants from Prussia who developed a business model that extends into the modern era. Shreveport lost one quarter of its population in less than a month due to a yellow fever epidemic. And that is just the beginning.

In the autumn of 1873, one of the worst yellow fever epidemics in U.S. history swept through Shreveport. As the deadly scourge claimed a quarter of the town's population, the dedicated efforts of five missionary priests offered a call to hope, even as they laid down their own lives in the struggle. True martyrdom is vanishingly rare, extolled as the highest possible sacrifice, yet Shreveport bore abundant witness through these five saintly priests. Their heroism in the midst of this tragic chapter is captured here by a trio of authors, winding a narrative that transcends history to reveal complex themes of virtue, sacrifice and response in times of human crisis and suffering.

"In this manuscript, Henry Alexander Wiencek takes a local approach to early twentieth-century domestic American energy production, what he calls "a gathering historical force" that was dramatically altering the economic, political, and social fabric of the United States. At this time, firms like Standard Oil were becoming some of the most influential actors on earth, wielding enormous power over the American economy and government--and leading some historians to tell the story of oil as a simple one of triumph and transformation. But, as Wiencek argues, a close look at the industry's venture into North Louisiana reveals a more varied and contested story of interaction, one in which global forces of industrial capitalism collided with--and often had to accommodate--local economic, social, political, and ecological dynamics. Despite its well-documented financial and technological prowess, the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to those circumstances--an international engine of economic power assuming a local form. Wiencek's chapters cover a lot of territory, from the history of oil boomtowns and "illicit" behavior to environmental impacts and political legacies. Not surprisingly, a key part of the story has to do with race. The new oil economy, he shows, collided with long-standing racial ideologies, which delineated sharp economic, social, and legal boundaries within the new industry. Prior to the boom, nearly three-quarters of the area's population was Black, with many rural tenant farmers working the same areas as their enslaved ancestors. But as oil created a lucrative new source of wages, racial violence became a way of ensuring the oil rigs--and the jobs they generated--would remain all white. On the other hand, oil did not naturally adhere to racial boundaries and at times was discovered under Black-owned lands, with complicated legal and social consequences that Wiencek explores via compelling case studies"--

This is the first comprehensive, annotated biography of John Scopes, the famed defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial. This biography uses new, never-before-published sources, photographs, and stories from untapped sources-John Scopes's family and friends. In 1967, John Scopes published his memoirs, which focused overwhelmingly on his eight-day trial and not on the rest of his life, ignoring several important events, such as his divorce and remarriage, his run for the U.S. Congress, and his challenges with his family. This volume is the first complete, annotated biography of John Scopes. It details his entire life and, where appropriate, those of his parents, siblings, wife, and children, all supported by hundreds of cited sources, quotations, and family stories. Ideal for readers with an interest in academic freedom, free speech, or the evolution-creationism controversy, this book uncovers the facts of Scopes's post-trial life, including the challenges that Scopes faced in his personal life, his conversion from a socialist to a political conservative, and his final years and death. Readers will be surprised to learn that John Scopes's life differed significantly from what has often been presented in the media.