LSUS's Noel Collection doubles size of pre-1850 European offerings with recent acquisitions

By Matt Vines April 11, 2025

SHREVEPORT – The James Smith Noel Collection at LSUS is already a research powerhouse with nearly 250,000 volumes on more than 100 different subject areas.

But the Noel Collection is especially known for its pre-1850 European history, and that category expanded recently with the addition of a private collection.

Through a personal connection, Noel Collection curator Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze added more than 1,000 books and periodicals that tackle Europe’s military, political and economic history between 1650-1850.

“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 comes from Steven Smith, a California professor who loved history and digitally corresponded with Mikaberidze for more than three decades about Napoleonic history.

“I was a student when we came across each other online on a Napoleonic forum,” said Mikaberidze, who is 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 died this past year, 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.”

The diversity of language – and perspective – paints a more complete historical picture of a given time 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 explained. “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 this collection contains a lot of periodicals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries – research that one doesn’t find in later books.

One of Smith’s interests was uniformology – 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.”

Now Mikaberidze hopes to impress upon collectors – and their family members – to think about what happens to collections when collectors are no longer here.

“Time and again, I hear of people passing away and families chunking entire collections,” Mikaberidze said. “But giving that collection to us or some kind of library is a way of preserving the collector’s legacy and benefitting the community.

“It’s a great investment in making sure that students and the community have the tools needed to grow and learn.”