Sessions are free and open to the public. Check out the RELIC schedule for a library near you. Advance registration at the host library is required, and participants check out the books used in each series. Brief Descriptive Profile of Current RELIC Programs:

1. The Native American World of the Southeastern United States, an exploration of the world view and experiences of Native Americans, with particular focus on tribes previously or presently inhabiting Louisiana and the Southeast United States. Native American Legends: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations by Charles Lankford and The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana by Fred Kniffen and others provide folkloric and historical frameworks of reference for both cross-cultural and comparative cultural learning. Fiction such as Powerby Linda Hogan and the autobiography Black Elk Speaks relate the Native American experience in the region to the broader historical experience of all Native Americans.
2. Louisiana History: Perspectives on the Pelican State, a recently updated overview of the state's historical development accented with focused readings about Louisiana covering colonial, antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, Populist, and contemporary periods. Texts for the program are: The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803, by Carl Brasseaux, Twelve Years A Slave, a unique narrative by Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold as a slave in Louisiana, The Civil War Memoirs of Captain William J. Seymour: Reminiscences of a Louisiana Tiger, edited by Terry L. Jones, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America, by John M. Barry, and A.J. Leibling’s The Earl of Louisiana.
3. Folktales and Stories of the South and Louisiana, a comparison of the folklore traditions of the state's three largest ethnic sectors: Anglo-Americans, African-Americans and Acadians. Louisiana and Southern folktales are addressed with three group-specific collections: Afro-American Folktales: Stories from the Black Tradition in the New World, which presents African tales throughout the Western Hemisphere and specifically by each Southern state, Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South examining a region wide tradition with an influential presence in the pine hill uplands of northern Louisiana, and Cajun Folktales, focusing on the Acadian settlers in Louisiana's coastal lowlands. Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana supports more broadly and provides more versions of many stories in the other texts.
4. The American West in Fact and Fiction, a program about the American West as symbol in the national psyche and setting for contending forces past and present. The critical history The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West by Patricia Nelson Limerick will be used along side diverse novels. Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, was one of the first works to set the characters and imagery of the western” as it has been conventionally portrayed. But other, radically differing, conceptions of the West as experience are also available in Winter in the Blood by Native author James Welch and The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey.
5. Becoming American: The Literature of Immigration and Acculturation, a program using a widely diverse collection of authors to look at the experience of external and internal migration and assimilation. While not every single group can be accommodated, this program’s canvas includes Jewish, East Asian, African American, Asian Indian, Native American, Hispanic and Caribbean works such as, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, The Imported Bridegroom by Abraham Cahan, Typical American by Gish Jen, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, as well as short stories by Maxine Hong Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, N. Scott Momaday and others from American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context, edited by Barbara Roach Rico and Sandra Mano.
6. Louisiana Characters: Biographies of the Bayou State, a program exploring the uniqueness of Louisiana’s people over nearly three centuries through the lens of biography and autobiography. Personalities of controversial and sometimes legendary significance will be studied in works about or by them: Christine Vella’s Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of Baroness Pontalba, Lyle Saxon’s Lafitte the Pirate, Unveiling Kate Chopin by Emily Toth, The Kingfish an His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey Long by William Ivy Hair, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, by Louis Armstrong, and The Last Madam by Christine Wiltz. Besides the reading about larger than life or colorful personalities, participants will engage issues involving this genre of reading: What makes a life worth writing about?
7. I’ll Be Seeing You. . . America and World War II, a program that examines how Americans waged total war for human rights using an arsenal of new weapons and combat tactics that still shape the world today. Readers will examine the nature of the war as fought on the high seas of the Pacific and the plains of Europe with the perspective of America’s principle opponents included. The texts are: Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway by Walter Lord, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, Japan at War: An Oral History edited by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, The Mighty Eighth: The Air War in Europe As Told by the Men Who Fought It, edited by Gerald Astor, Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History, edited by Johannes Steinhoff, and Double Victory: A Multicultural history of America in World War II, by Ronald Takaki.
8. The Louisiana Purchase: Impact and Legacy offers readers opportunities to meet in their public library to discuss the role and impact of the Louisiana Purchase in the context of international politics and the sweep of American history. The historical texts are Jon Kukla’s A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America and Stephen Ambrose’s majestically written Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.
9. In the Cross Hairs: Louisiana’s Hurricane Experience is an abbreviated, three-session program.  It presents readers in Louisiana the opportunity to step back from their own, raw, experiences and also find expression for these same experiences in the reading and discussion format of the RELIC program series.  The text to be discussed is the riveting Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson.
10. Battleground Louisiana: Civil War Events and Experiences will offer the reading public an opportunity to examine several significant campaigns and their outcomes, as well as the experiences of some of the important segments in Louisiana society.  Texts are Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868, ed. John Q. Anderson, a look at the disintegration of plantation society, One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign, Gary D. Joiner, about the largest campaign west of the Mississippi River, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans, Chester Hearne’s critical reexamination of “Beast Butler,” The Civil War in Louisiana, by John D. Winters, and an assessment of the black Union soldier’s life in The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War, by James G. Hollandsworth.
11. The Creole Identity and Experience in Louisiana Literature and History will offer the reading public an opportunity to consider issues such as why Creole identity migrated among groups over history and how class, race, and culture have been navigated by writers of the Creole experience.  Texts range from the multi-generations story Cane River, by Lalita Tademy, Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, an album of Creole thought and experience, ed. Sybil Kein, Anne Rice’s novel Feast of All Saints, the historical analysis of Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds. Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, and Catherine Carmier, Ernest Gaines’ first novel.
12. Elizabeth I of England and Her Times looks at England under the Renaissance prince(ss).  The texts cover many areas: The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir, the great confrontation between Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain in The Armada by historian Garrett Mattingly, people’s experiences in London in  Liza Picard's unique study Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London, and Shakespeare Alive! by Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, a look into how The Bard's gift for phrase reflected the history and lives of the English people.
13. Where Is North Louisiana? This region specific program uses several texts to initiate a discussion about the area where a vast collection of people who have lived in North Louisiana for over two centuries say that they are. Louisiana Power and Light is a series of fictional stories set in the Monroe region by John Dufresne, Pentecostalism and upstate rural Louisiana are examined in Ann Rowe Seaman’s Swaggart: The Unathorized Biography of an American Evangelist, the north’s African American arts and food ways are the focus of On My Way: The Arts of Sarah Albritton edited by Susan Roach, and the legacy of the music scene in Shreveport is showcased in Shreveport Sounds in Black and White by Kip Lornell and Tracey Laird.
14. Encounter in Louisiana: Conflict and Confluence in Literary Currents, a recently updated program which addresses the experience of “encounter” among classes, races, cultures through novel literature.  Pulitzer Prize-winning The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau looks into the world of race in plantation society, where pedigree and standing cloaked the real relations among black and white. In A Lesson before Dying by Ernest Gaines, race is brutally laid bare in a small town in which each character must come to terms with each other. A Confederacy of Dunces, winner of the Pulitzer Prize by John Kennedy Toole, the port city of New Orleans is a setting for encounters too numerous to mention. More serious are the encounters in the swamp timber country of Tim Gautreaux’s The Clearing.

For more information, contact: James Segreto, RELIC Program Director • 504.620.2630 • segreto@leh.org