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Furious Flower
Seeding the Future of African American Poetry
Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne; Foreword by Rita Dove
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the  work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What’s next for Black poetic expression?
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Henry Grady's New South
Atlanta, a Brave and Beautiful City
Harold E. Davis
University of Alabama Press, 1990
    The popular image of Henry W. Grady is that of a champion of the postbellum South, a region that would forgive the North for defeating it and would mobilize its own many resources for hones business and agricultural competition. Biographies and collections of Grady’s essays and speeches that appeared shortly after his death enhanced this image, and for a half-century, Grady was considered the personification of the New South Movement, a movement which promised industrialization for the South, an improved Southern agriculture, and justice and opportunity for black Southerners. As managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, he espoused the New South throughout the nation and was in demand as a speaker for audiences in New York and Boston.
    Through extensive research, focusing on the decade of the 1880s in Georgia, Davis demonstrates that although Grady said all the right things to show that he wished to industrialize the South and that he was committed to the improvement of agriculture and fairness in racial matters, in fact he spent most of his efforts on behalf of Atlanta. His major interest was in making a difference for that city, leaving the rest of the South to enjoy whatever Atlanta could not garner for itself.
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Histories of Southeastern Archaeology
Edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt
University of Alabama Press, 2002
This volume provides a comprehensive, broad-based overview, including first-person accounts, of the development and conduct of archaeology in the Southeast over the past three decades.

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology originated as a symposium at the 1999 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) organized in honor of the retirement of Charles H. McNutt following 30 years of teaching anthropology. Written for the most part by members of the first post-depression generation of southeastern archaeologists, this volume offers a window not only into the archaeological past of the United States but also into the hopes and despairs of archaeologists who worked to write that unrecorded history or to test scientific theories concerning culture.

The contributors take different approaches, each guided by experience, personality, and location, as well as by the legislation that shaped the practical conduct of archaeology in their area. Despite the state-by-state approach, there are certain common themes, such as the effect (or lack thereof) of changing theory in Americanist archaeology, the explosion of contract archaeology and its relationship to academic archaeology, goals achieved or not achieved, and the common ground of SEAC.
 

This book tells us how we learned what we now know about the Southeast's unwritten past. Of obvious interest to professionals and students of the field, this volume will also be sought after by historians, political scientists, amateurs, and anyone interested in the South.

Additional reviews:

"A unique publication that presents numerous historical, topical, and personal perspectives on the archaeological heritage of the Southeast."—Southeastern Archaeology
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Honey in the Horn
H.L. Davis
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Set in Oregon in the early years of the twentieth century, H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn chronicles the struggles faced by homesteaders as they attempted to settle down and eke out subsistence from a still-wild land. With sly humor and keenly observed detail, Davis pays homage to the indomitable character of Oregon’s restless people and dramatic landscapes without romanticizing or burnishing the myths.

Clay Calvert, an orphan, works as a hand on a sheep ranch until he stumbles into trouble and is forced to flee. Journeying throughout the state, from the lush coastal forests, to the Columbia Gorge, to the golden wheat fields east of the Cascades, he encounters a cast of characters as rich and diverse as the land, including a native Tunne boy and a beautiful girl named Luce.

Originally published in 1935, Honey in the Horn reveals as much about the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of H. L. Davis’ lifetime as it does about the earlier era in which it is set. It transcends the limitations of its time through the sheer power and beauty of Davis’ prose. Full of humor and humanity, Davis’s first novel displays a vast knowledge of Pacific Northwest history, lore, and landscape.

An essential book for all serious readers of Northwest literature, this classic coming-of-age novel has been called the “Huckleberry Finn of the West.” It is the only Oregon book that has ever won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. With a new introduction by Richard W. Etulain, this important work from one of Oregon’s premier authors is once again available for a new generation to enjoy.
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Plastic Matter
Heather Davis
Duke University Press, 2022
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation.
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Remembering Awatovi
The Story of an Archaeological Expedition in Northern Arizona, 1935–1939
Hester A. Davis
Harvard University Press, 2008

Remembering Awatovi is the engaging story of a major archaeological expedition on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona. Centered on the large Pueblo village of Awatovi, with its Spanish mission church and beautiful kiva murals, the excavations are renowned not only for the data they uncovered but also for the interdisciplinary nature of the investigations. In archaeological lore they are also remembered for the diverse, fun-loving, and distinguished cast of characters who participated in or visited the dig.

Hester Davis’s lively account—part history of archaeology, part social history—is told largely in the words of the participants, among whom were two of Davis’s siblings, artist Penny Davis Worman and archaeologist Mott Davis. Life in the remote field camp abounded with delightful storytelling, delicious food, and good-natured high-jinks. Baths were taken in a stock tank, beloved camp automobiles were given personal names, and a double bed had to be trucked across the desert and up a mesa to celebrate a memorable wedding.

Remembering Awatovi is illustrated with over 160 portraits and photographs of camp life. Essays by Eric Polingyouma and Brian Fagan enrich the presentation.

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Small-Town Heroes
Images of Minor League Baseball
Hank Davis
University of Iowa Press, 1997

For many baseball fans, a major league game is a flickering image on a television screen or a story in a newspaper. Real baseball is played in their hometown, in a ballpark that seats 5,000 fans, not 50,000. The players wear uniforms like the ones seen on television, but their names are not household words—unless it happens to be summer and you are living in Bluefield, West Virginia, or Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Batavia, New York.

In 1993, ex-New Yorker Hank Davis put a successful career in psychology and music journalism on hold and went off on a loving odyssey through twenty-eight host towns in search of minor league baseball. Writing with beguiling charm and a firm knowledge of the game, he traveled the back roads of small-town Canada and America and found more than he bargained for: a wondrous cast of characters on the field, in the stands, and on the way to the ballpark. Davis recorded them with his splendid, incisive prose and his remarkable photographs. Along the way he encountered not only the baseball stars of the future, like Derek Jeter, Terrell Wade, and Tim Crabtree, but also a host of fascinating unknowns and longshots. They, too, have stories to tell that will not appear on the stat sheets.

With infectious energy, Davis also looked beyond the players. There are coaches, men in their forties and beyond, making arduous bus trips with players half their age. There are assistant general managers happy to scrub toilets and paint dugouts just to be close to the game. Kids sell Cracker Jacks in Bluefield, and grown-ups operate the mechanical bull at Durham Athletic Park.

Davis finds the small-town setting a universe unto itself. Within it, minor league baseball is lost in a time warp. Unabashedly unsophisticated, it has all the quirky charm of a traveling carnival—full of hawkers and gawkers and the unaffected simplicity of a concert in the park on a hot July night. Davis' full account of his baseball journey is rich with detail inside and outside the ballpark.

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Springs of Scientific Creativity
Essays on Founders of Modern Science
claire Aris
University of Minnesota Press, 1983
Springs of Scientific Creativity was first published in 1983.Mathematician Henri Poincaré was boarding a bus when he realized that the transformations of non-Euclidian geometry were just those he needed in his research on the theory of functions. He did not have to interrupt his conversation, still less to verify the equation in detail; his insight was complete at that point. Poincaré’s insight into his own creativity -- his awareness that preliminary cogitation and the working of the subconscious had prepared his mind for an intuitive flash of recognition -- is just one of many possible analyses of scientific creativity, a subject as fascinating as it is elusive.The authors of this book have chosen to search for the springs of scientific creativity by examining the lives and work of a dozen innovative thinkers in the fields of mathematics, physics, and chemistry from the seventeenth down to the mid-twentieth century. First prepared for delivery in a lecture series held at the University of Minnesota, these essays delve into the social, psychological, and intellectual factors that fostered creativity in the lives of Galilei Galileo, Isaac Newton, J. P. Joule, James Cler Maxwell, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lord Rayleigh, Elmer Sperry and Adrian Leverkühn, Walter Nernst, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Michael Polyani, and John von Neumann.The contributors are Thomas B. Settle, Richard S. Westfall, Donald S. L. Cardwell, C. W. F. Everitt, Martin J. Klein, John N. Howard, Thomas P. Hughes, Erwin N. Hiebert, Stanley Goldberg, Linda Wessels, William T. Scott, and Herman H. Goldstine.
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Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else
Selected Essays
Harry L. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Harry L. Davis joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1963, and he has since become one of the most influential figures in business education in the United States and abroad. He helped develop the first core leadership program of any top-rated MBA institution in the country and the Management Lab. Davis also helped Booth pioneer its first international campus in Barcelona in 1983, where he served as deputy dean for a decade.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Davis’s arrival at the Booth School, Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else offers seven essays by Davis that offer new perspectives and contribute to a more well-rounded understanding of business education. Adapted from convocation addresses given by Davis at different points during his five-decade career, the essays encapsulate the spirit of business education at the Booth School, while at the same time providing encouraging, invaluable wisdom for those about to embark on business careers or take on leadership positions. Topics addressed range from the role of the university in the business world to the crucial role of intangible values in shaping one’s career.

Davis has been a formative influence on more executives and leaders than perhaps any other business educator living today, and Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else provides a unique and valuable perspective on how leaders in business and elsewhere can shape and define their careers in new ways.
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