Southeastern NEWS

                                                       Southeastern Louisiana University
                                           Public Information Office
                                           publicinfo@selu.edu
                                           SLU 880, Hammond, LA 70402
                                           504/549-2341/fax 504-549-2061
    Date: 7/1/98                                  
      Contact:                           Christina Chapple   18

Editors: Photo accompanies release -- Please note local interest
SLU PROF WINS NATIONAL AWARD FOR BOOK ON FLORIDA PARISH HISTORY
     HAMMOND -- Southeastern Louisiana University professor Samuel C. Hyde Jr. has
received a national award for "Pistos and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana's
Florida Parishes, 1810-1899," his history of the Florida Parishes' legacy of 19th century violence
and anarchy.
     The book, published in 1996 by Louisiana State University Press, was awarded the
Certificate of Commendation by the American Association for State and Local History. Hyde
was one of 21 individuals and organizations honored nationally by the 54-year-old AASLH
awards program.
     According to the AASLH, the award is "the most prestigious recognition for achievement
in the preservation and interpretation of local, state, and regional history." Hyde will be
recognized at a special banquet during the 1998 AASLH/California Council for the Promotion of
History joint annual meeting in Sacramento, Calif., in September.
     An Amite native and Denham Springs resident, Hyde is director of Southeastern's
Center for Regional Studies and Archives. He has a doctoral degree from Louisiana State
University and bachelor's degree from Tulane University and studied for four years as an
exchange student at universities in Germany, Austria, and London, England. 
     A member of Southeastern's history faculty since 1992, Hyde also edited "Plain Folk of
the South Revisted." The book is a collection of articles from Southeastern's 1996 Plain Folk of
the South Symposium, which explored the history of "common Southerners" in the 19th century.
He  also has coordinated the university's acclaimed Deep Delta Civil War Symposium since
1994.
                                 (MORE) 
HYDE BOOK AWARD -- Add One
     
In "Pistols and Politics," Hyde examines how calm and conflict between the classes 
shaped 19th century southeastern Louisiana, a society characterized by an exceptional level of
social and political turmoil. The book stresses the prevailing myth of poverty in the Florida
Parishes' piney woods and portrays the methods the ruling planter elite used to manipulate the
common people. Hyde examines the area's potentially destructive political traditions as well as
the complex mores, values, and dynamics of a society that produced some of the fiercest and
most enduring blood fueds in American history.
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