BiblioVault - Books by Davis, Donald

Cripple Joe

Stories from my Daddy

Donald Davis

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016

Donald Davis was a young United Methodist minister when the telephone rang one morning. "It's your daddy," the caller said, "Mama just couldn't get him awake this morning. He is gone."

"A million questions about him began to line themselves up in my mind." Davis writes. "Where did he go to high school? I did not know." Did he get any education behind that? What were his early jobs, and where did he live then? I was now only twenty-eight, my father was dead, and I had been to young and immature to know to ask t=for the stories that would have filled out his life for me."

The surprise of a lifetime came when he called home and his recently departed father picked up the phone: "Hello! This is Joe Davis. What can I do for you today?"

That case of mistaken identity changed Donald Davis's outlook on the value of family and the need for story gathering. In the twenty-two years until his father's second death, he rarely let an opportunity pass to collect and cherish the stories of his life.

Cripple Joe is the happy result.

Davis tells how his father and an African-American hospital orderly quietly broke down racial barriers in their small mountain town.

He tells how his father employed his humane brand of justice on an eager young chemist whose experiments veered into manufacturing gunpowder, on sons who nearly burned a barn, and on teenagers who organized a disastrous coed camping trip.

And best of all, he tells how Joe Davis--a man known as "Banker Joe" for his work in the loan department but to a select few as "Cripple Joe"--turned a gruesome accident into an opportunity that broadened his world and that of his son.

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Distorted Mirrors

Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century

Donald E. Davis & Eugene P. Trani

University of Missouri Press, 2009

As the United States enters the twenty-first century, it confronts two powers that loomed less large on the world stage a century before. Yet American policies toward Russia and China have been shaped by attitudes going back even further, as this new book relates.

Distorted Mirrors traces American prejudices toward the two countries by focusing on the views of influential writers and politicians over the course of the twentieth century. Donald Davis and Eugene Trani show where American images of Russia and China originated, how they evolved, and how they have often helped sustain foreign policies generally negative toward the former and positive toward the latter.

This wide-ranging survey draws on memoirs, archives, and interviews, much the material appearing in print for the first time, to show how influential individuals shaped these perceptions and policies based on what they saw—or thought they saw—in those two countries. Through a series of tableaux that traces America’s relations with Russia and China through the twentieth century, the authors show how personalities of certain players impacted interpretation of key situations and conflicts and how cultural attitudes toward Russia and China became ingrained and difficult to dislodge.

The book traces formative attitudes back to two late-nineteenth-century books, with George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System painting a grim picture of tsarist penal colonies and William Rockhill’s Land of the Lamas depicting China as an exotic Shangri-la. Davis and Trani show how these images were sustained over the years: for Russia, by Slavic expert Samuel Harper, State Department official Robert Kelley, journalist Eugene Lyons, ambassador William Bullitt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and policymakers George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze; and for China, by President Woodrow Wilson, philosopher John Dewey, journalist Edgar Snow, novelist Pearl S. Buck, ambassador Nelson T. Johnson, FDR, journalist Theodore White, and statesman Henry Kissinger. They also relate how Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush tried to replace these misconceptions with a policy of accommodation, and they assess the state of current U.S. attitudes and policies.

Distorted Mirrors marks a fresh approach to U.S. relations with these countries, emphasizing long-term attitudes that influenced policies rather than the reverse. It shows us that perceptions shaped over the course of the twentieth century are crucial for their bearing on the twenty-first, particularly if those unrestrained prejudices reemerge.

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The First Cold War

The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S. - Soviet Relations

Donald E. Davis & Eugene P. Trani

University of Missouri Press, 2002

In The First Cold War, Donald E. Davis and Eugene P. Trani review the Wilson administration’s attitudes toward Russia before, during, and after the Bolshevik seizure of power. They argue that before the Russian Revolution, Woodrow Wilson had little understanding of Russia and made poor appointments that cost the United States Russian goodwill. Wilson later reversed those negative impressions by being the first to recognize Russia’s Provisional Government, resulting in positive U.S.–Russian relations until Lenin gained power in 1917.

Wilson at first seemed unsure whether to recognize or repudiate Lenin and the Bolsheviks. His vacillation finally ended in a firm repudiation when he opted for a diplomatic quarantine having almost all of the ingredients of the later Cold War. Davis and Trani argue that Wilson deserves mild criticism for his early indecision and inability to form a coherent policy toward what would become the Soviet Union. But they believe Wilson rightly came to the conclusion that until the regime became more moderate, it was useless for America to engage it diplomatically.

The authors see in Wilson’s approach the foundations for the “first Cold War”—meaning not simply a refusal to recognize the Soviet Union, but a strong belief that its influence was harmful and would spread if not contained or quarantined. Wilson’s Soviet policy in essence lasted until Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition in the 1930s. But The First Cold War suggests that Wilson’s impact extended beyond Roosevelt to Truman, showing that the policies of Wilson and Truman closely resemble each other with the exception of an arms race. Wilson’s intellectual reputation lent credibility to U.S. Cold War policy from Truman to Reagan, and the reader can draw a direct connection from Wilson to the collapse of the USSR. Wilsonians were the first Cold War warriors, and in the era of President Woodrow Wilson, the first Cold War began.

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How They Linger

Stories of Unforgettable Souls

Donald Davis

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2024

This cycle of original stories features unusual, remarkable, and dear people whom the author has known.
Although everyone has a story, not everybody has a remarkable storyteller like Donald Davis to tell theirs.

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Mountains of Injustice

Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia

Michele Morrone

Ohio University Press, 2011

Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.

Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for environmental justice, Mountains of Injustice contributes to the ongoing debate over how to equitably distribute the long-term environmental costs and consequences of economic development.

Contributors:
Laura Allen, Brian Black, Geoffrey L. Buckley, Donald Edward Davis, Wren Kruse, Nancy Irwin Maxwell, Chad Montrie, Michele Morrone, Kathryn Newfont, John Nolt, Jedediah S. Purdy, and Stephen J. Scanlan.

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Studying Appalachian Studies

Making the Path by Walking

Edited by Chad Berry, Phillip J. Obermiller, and Shaunna L. Scott

University of Illinois Press, 2015

In this collection, contributors reflect on scholarly, artistic, activist, educational, and practical endeavor known as Appalachian Studies. Following an introduction to the field, the writers discuss how Appalachian Studies illustrates the ways interdisciplinary studies emerge, organize, and institutionalize themselves, and how they engage with intellectual, political, and economic forces both locally and around the world.

Essayists argue for Appalachian Studies' integration with kindred fields like African American studies, women's studies, and Southern studies, and they urge those involved in the field to globalize the perspective of Appalachian Studies; to commit to continued applied, participatory action, and community-based research; to embrace more fully the field's capacity for bringing about social justice; to advocate for a more accurate understanding of Appalachia and its people; and to understand and overcome the obstacles interdisciplinary studies face in the social and institutional construction of knowledge.

Contributors: Chris Baker, Chad Berry, Donald Edward Davis, Amanda Fickey, Chris Green, Erica Abrams Locklear, Phillip J. Obermiller, Douglas Reichert Powell, Michael Samers, Shaunna L. Scott, and Barbara Ellen Smith.

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Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

Donald Davis

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

A cycle of twenty stories, each of which is focused on childhood friends, the antics of his neighborhood and school chums, and the mysteries of adult life seen through a child’s unerring eye.

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The Train That Had Wings

Selected Stories of M. Mukundan

M. Mukundan; Translated from the Malayalam by Donald R. Davis Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 2005

The Train That Had Wings presents modern life in Kerala in terms of a shared but tragically compromised humanity. Mukundan dares to look beneath the routines and facades of everyday life in order to probe depth of sin, greed, and hypocrisy but also to rediscover what brings joy and hope.

Sixteen short story translations and a critical introduction, offering examples of Mukundan's realistic, existentialist, psychedelic, and parabolic stories, show his range and talent for the very short story. If Hawthorne wrote “twice told tales,” Mukundan writes half-told tales, stories that jump in the middle, stomp around for just a minute, and leap away almost before the reader can settle in. Half-told, but a powerful and infectious half.

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Voices from the Nueva Frontera

Latino Immigration in Dalton, Georgia

Donald E. Davis

University of Tennessee Press, 2009

“This book will serve as a valuable resource for other scholars in their attempts to better understand how Latino newcomers are transforming their new homes in this country.” —Melvin Delgado, author of Social Work with Latinos: A Cultural Assets Paradigm

The Dalton-Whit?eld County area of Georgia has one of the highest concentrations of Latino residents in the southeastern United States. In 2006, a Washington Post article referred to the carpet-manufacturing city of Dalton as a “U.S. border town,” even though the community lies more than twelve hundred miles from Mexico. Voices from the Nueva Frontera explores this phenomenon, providing an in-depth picture of Latino immigration and dispersal in rural America along with a framework for understanding the economic integration of the South with Latin America.

Voices from the Nueva Frontera sheds new light on the often invisible changes that have transformed this north Georgia town over the last thirty years. The book's contributors explore the changes to labor markets and educational, religious, and social organizations and show that Dalton provides a largely successful example of a community that has provided a home to a newly arriving immigrant work force. While debates about immigration have raged in the public spotlight in recent years, some of the most important voices-those of the immigrants themselves-have been nearly unheard. In this pathbreaking book, therefore, each chapter opens with an interview of a worker, student, teacher, or other professional involved in the immigrant experience. These narratives add human faces to the realities of dramatic change occurring in rural industrial towns.

Sure to spark lively discussion in the classroom and beyond, Voices from the Nueva Frontera gives readers a look at individual human stories and provides much-needed documentation for what might be the most important social change in recent southern history.

Donald E. Davis, Thomas M. Deaton, and David Boyle are on the faculty at Dalton State College. Jo-Anne Schick is the former director of the Georgia Project.

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