Archives
The J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library at Loyola University New Orleans is the repository of a rich collection on southern Catholicism. The Monroe Library's archives document the role of Catholics in literature and the arts, environmental issues, the media, and politics.
Loyola's collection holds the complete archives of the 10-state New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus, the founders of Loyola. The archives consist of more than 340 linear feet of manuscript material documenting the mission work of Jesuits throughout the South since 1837. A rare glimpse of Catholic life in the South can be found in the photographs, financial records, diaries, memoirs, and narratives collected from every Jesuit serving in the New Orleans Province.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has characterized the holdings that form the basis of the Center for the Study of Catholics in the South as "vital to the study of Southern religion, politics, cultural history, and to the history of ideas in the United States.
First recorded
history of the province, a diary written by Fr. Maisounabe, S.J.
and
Fr. Jourdant, S.J (1847-1855)
