Cadet band group portrait 1912

The University Archives Photograph Collection currently consists of 662 images dating from 1862 through 1936, focusing primarily on the period from 1885 to 1925. These include athletics (football, baseball, tennis, track and field, fencing, basketball, and playing fields) from 1894 to 1936; classes, classrooms, and laboratories (biology, bookkeeping, chemistry, entomology, zoology, veterinary science, English, drafting, civil engineering) from c. 1890 to 1936; graduating classes from 1871 to 1906; individual students and student groups from 1862 to 1918; faculty and administrators from 1862 to 1916; the Audubon Sugar School from 1887 to 1907; cadet life (drill, cadet bands, rifle and artillery firing) from 1890 to 1916; and the buildings and grounds of the downtown campus from 1887 to 1925.

Currently consisting of twenty items, the University Archives Printed Materials Collection includes programs commemorating campus events from LSU’s “semi-centennial” (fiftieth anniversary) in 1910, the dedication of the present campus in 1926, the fiftieth anniversary of coeducation at LSU (1956), Centennial events in 1959-1960, and April 30th at LSU: A Bicentennial Convocation Observing the 50th Anniversary of the Dedication of the Present Campus in 1976.  Also included are maps of the downtown campus from 1895 to 1908, maps of Williams Plantation (the land that became LSU’s present campus) from 1920 and University property in 1940, plans of the quadrangle from 1936 and 1975, a planimetric (horizontal features only without regard for topography) map of campus created in 1958, and a topographical survey of the Mississippi River created by the LSU Department of Civil Engineering in 1909. Other items include sheet music entitled L.S.U. Semi-Centennial Waltz composed for LSU’s fiftieth anniversary in 1910, promotional brochures entitled Louisiana State University Views and Activities 1936,

This is LSU

The photographs can be searched by keyword and by such topics as athletics, cadet life, clubs and student activities, and college presidents and faculty, as well as by colleges and departments and campus buildings.  The printed materials are searchable by keyword.  

Both collections can be viewed at: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/archives/digital/.

For additional sugar resources in Special Collections, please consult our online catalog and our “Sugar” subject guide.

Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917

Documenting Louisiana Sugar provides historians and social scientists with an innovative tool for examining plantation economy and agrarian society in the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns and additional census records, Documenting Louisiana Sugar makes available two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and macro detail the evolution of one of America’s definitive plantation crops, namely cane sugar. These can be freely accessed at www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar

For over seventy years, agrarian economists in Louisiana diligently recorded economic and production data on each sugar producing estate. These remarkable records provide an unbroken time series of data; indeed, no other plantation crop in the American South was so meticulously recorded for such a long period of time as was Louisiana sugar. This project makes these sources available for rigorous analysis and provides users with the query functions capable of tracing people and plantations through time. It enables users to study the economic performance of an entire industry, to consider business consolidation, capital acquisition, technology transfer, and the shifting dynamics of plantation land use. The built in search functions enable researchers to limit or expand their enquiries by year, parish, crop output, technology, and even gender. Users can track persistence and change among the plantation elite, trace landholding and economic performance among both large and small cane farmers, examine the effect of the American Civil War, and assess the transition from slave to free labor on Louisiana’s plantation economy. And for those interested in the late nineteenth century, the databases track the rise and fall of American sugar during U.S. imperial expansion. No other public database detailing plantation life in such detail exists and we hope that scholars find this resource to be a valuable research tool.

Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described Louisiana’s sugar country as a “life of living death.” These databases do not tell the story of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who labored in the cane fields through the nineteenth century, but they tell the story of an industry where the exploitation of land, capital, and labor was central to business success.

Funding for this project was made available by research project grants awarded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by the University of Sussex and the University of Toronto.

The image used above is from the LSU Photograph Collection.

The collection includes more than 1,100 images by Percy Viosca. These images were scanned by the staff of Hill Memorial Library after being salvaged by Louisiana Sea Grant and the LSU AgCenter Extension. For more information about this project and the work of Percy Viosca, Jr., visit the project website. To view the collection, visit the LOUISiana Digital Library.