LSU Shreveport’s Noel Collection doubles European history offerings with recent acquisitions

SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS)—LSU Shreveport’s James Smith Noel Collection is a robust research database that includes almost 250,000 volumes on over 100 different subjects. The collection’s biggest strength is its pre-1850 European history.

A private collection acquired by Noel Collection curator Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze added over 1,000 books and periodicals dealing with Europe’s military, political, and economic history from 1650 to 1850.

“This addition more than doubles the size of what we have concentrated in that area,” said Mikaberidze, an LSUS history professor and the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair. “This is the fourth private collection we’ve acquired, plus what the Noel Collection originally had, and we now have more than 3,000 volumes that focus on this period.

“Our goal is to turn the library into the pre-eminent place to research this time period in the state, and the addition of this collection does that. Many of these books are likely the only copy that can be found in the state.”

The collection was donated by Steven Smith, a California professor with a passion for history who had communicated with Mikaberidze about Napoleonic history for over thirty years.

“I was a student when we came across each other online on a Napoleonic forum,” said Mikaberidze, now considered one of the world’s top Napoleonic experts. “He was much older, and I was still up and coming, but he was always very attentive to any problems I may come across in my research. We’ve been emailing each other for 30 years. Sometimes I’d ask him about things when I was writing a new book.”

Smith passed away in 2024, and Mikaberidze said Smith’s son reached out and said his father wanted him to have the collection.

“I was shocked because I’ve never considered that,” Mikaberidze said. “All we had to do was help him ship it from California, and that’s where the Noel Foundation helped financially for us to acquire this collection. There are books written in, of course, English but also French, Polish, Spanish, German, Swedish, and other languages.”

Mikaberidze explained that the diversity of language and perspective paints a more complete historical picture of a given period.

“For example, if we have books by German historians that are written in German, you’ll get far more detail about the German perspective because that’s the history that they are more attuned to,” Mikaberidze said. “We have one whole box about the Swedish experience in the 18th century.

“Some volumes are contemporary in that they are published during that time period, so there’s a lot of primary sources like letters and memoirs. Most volumes are secondary sources written by great historians.”

Mikaberidze added that Smith’s collection includes periodicals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that are typically absent from later books. One of Smith’s interests was uniformology, or the study of military uniforms.

“If you want to understand how armies looked, what they wore and why – we now have a strong collection on uniformology,” Mikaberidze said. “It’s one thing to go and buy individual volumes through catalogs or antique book dealers, but this collection has a ready-made concentration and fits nicely into the collection we already have.”

Mikaberidze said he wants to urge collectors and their family members to consider what will happen to collections when their collectors are gone.

“Time and again, I hear of people passing away and families chunking entire collections, but giving that collection to us or some kind of library is a way of preserving the collector’s legacy and benefitting the community,” Mikaberidze said. “It’s a great investment in making sure that students and the community have the tools needed to grow and learn.”