Spring 2025 Course Offerings
From the origins of World Civilization to Medieval witchcraft to the American West to the history of conspiracy theories and the end of the Cold War: We've got it all!
Many spaces are still open in some of the History Department's course offerings for the coming semester. Check schedules and subject matter:
Geaux Teach
Graduates of Geaux Teach, the Major in History with a Concentration in Secondary Education, pose with program advisor Prof. Zevi Gutfreund (far right). For information on the Secondary Education history program: Geaux Teach
Congratulations to Julia Palmer, Class of 2024 and Geaux Teach alumna, who was named New Teacher of the Year at Zachary High School.
High honor for LSU History professor
Boyd Professor Suzanne Marchand has been elected president of the American Historical Association, the premier professional organization for historians in the United States. Prof. Marchand will serve as vice-president during the coming year (2025) and president the year after that. Congratulations to Dr. Marchand on this signal honor!
Book News
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 
Focusing on prison development in early New Orleans, Prof. Bardes dramatically rewrites the origins of mass incarceration in the United States. Most Americans believe that enslaved people were never incarcerated. The Carceral City reveals the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved people were arrested and jail at astronomical rates. Lawmakers built massive slave prisons to help slaveholders maintain their control and profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates before the Civil War than are Black residents today. The true origins of mass incarceration, Bardes argues, lie in these early nineteenth-century efforts to design prisons for the specific needs of slave societies.
"Exceptionally well written, both smart and smooth.” --Jeff Forret, Lamar University
Events
January 31 (Friday) 2:00 pm in French House 135: Oceanic Itinerants: Transformation and its Limits in the Early Modern Spanish Tuna Fisheries, Professor Molly Warsh (University of Pittsburgh)
Feb 20 (Thursday) 3:30 pm in Himes 253: Colonial Cartography and the Decolonization of GIS, Professor Matthew Unangst (SUNY Oneonta)
March 14 (Friday) 3:00 pm in Coates Hall 145: Slaves of Southern Carceral States: Coerced Labor, Sexual Violence, and Resistance on the Prison Plantation, Professor Robert Chase (SUNY Stonybrook)
March 25 (Tuesday) 3:00 pm Coates Hall 218: “A Marvelous Foreshadowing”: The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Slave Trade and Its Impact on North American Slavery, Professor Andrea Mostermann (UNO)
The 83rd Annual Fleming Lectures: Writing Law, Rewriting Lives: Legal Authority in the Nineteenth-Century South, Professor Laura Edwards (Princeton University)
1: The Power of the Pen: Conjuring Law with Words on a Page, April 15 (Tuesday) 7:00 pm in Hill Memorial Library Auditorium
2: Printed Words, Worlds of Change: Capturing Law to Effect Social Change, April 16 (Wednesday) 10:00 am in Hill Memorial Library
3: The Tyranny of Text: Living within the Letter of the Law, April 16 (Wednesday) 2:00 pm in Hill Memorial Library
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