Announcements and activities. (Historical News and Notices).

In celebration of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, the Historic New Orleans Collection will present an exhibition that focuses on the domestic and international events and personalities that surrounded the purchase. The exhibition, "A Fusion of Nations, A Fusion of Cultures: Spain, France, the United States, and the Louisiana Purchase," unites for the first time more than a hundred items from museums and archives in France, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. Accompanying documents such as the famed Robert R. Livingston letter that "purchased a continent" are maps of the territory, portraits of principal figures involved in the negotiations, and paintings depicting the European sites associated with many of the treaties. Running concurrently in an adjoining gallery will be the exhibition "Napoleon's Eyewitness: Pierre Clement Laussat." Laussat, Napoleon's newly appointed colonial prefect of Louisiana, arrived in New Orleans to assume his post, only to discover that France had decided to sell Louisiana to the United States. The exhibition of more than seventy-five maps, documents, paintings, and artifacts traces Laussat's activities in the transfer of Louisiana from one nation to another.

These exhibitions open on January 14, 2003, and run through June 7, 2003, and are free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 A.M. until 4:30 P.M. at 533 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. For more information about the exhibition and program schedules, call the Historic New Orleans Collection at [phone], or visit our website: www.hnoc.org.

The Sixth Southern Conference on Women's History, sponsored by the Southern Association for Women Historians, will be held June 5-7, 2003, in Athens, Georgia. Held every three years, this conference provides a stimulating and congenial forum for the discussion of all aspects of women's history. Its program seeks to reflect the diversity of women's experiences in the United States and elsewhere and to feature the history of women from a wide range of racial, class, and ethnic backgrounds.

The conference will be hosted by the University of Georgia and held on the university's main campus, conveniently located near downtown Athens. Conference participants will be encouraged to take full advantage of the rich historical and cultural resources offered by the university and Athens, including local art, music, and historical sites. For more information, please visit the conference website: www.uga.edu/swch; or contact the conference coordinator, Kathleen Clark, by e-mail: [e-mail].

The University of Tennessee Press is pleased to welcome Peter S. Carmichael of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as the new editor of the Voices of the Civil War series. He succeeds Frank L. Byrne, who died in April 2002. For more information about the series, please contact Joyce Harrison, Acquisitions Editor, University of Tennessee Press, 110 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-4108; or e-mail: [e-mail].