From the late 1800s to the early 1950s, painted wall signs were a major mode of advertisement for both national companies and local businesses across America. Many of these artistic messages, now faded, peeling, and partially covered, still peek out from the storefronts, barns, alleyways, warehouses, theaters, and even stagecoach stops they once decorated.

Photographer Jeff Holder and author Cynthia Haas explore this often overlooked art form in Arkansas and show us signs that appear mysteriously in the rain, signs that are curiously painted in remote places, images and words now only half decipherable. From Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Grapette Soda to Kis-Me-Gum, Uneeda Biscuit, and Snowdrift Flour, the logos and slogans are at once familiar and enigmatic. Archival photographs reference the time
when these brightly colored messages covered the facades of downtown buildings. Of particular interest in this book are the profiles of three “wall dogs,” or sign painters, who remember the difficulties and joys of their unusual profession.

Ghost Signs of Arkansas ties us to a gentler past, a time when Main Street was the center of a community’s life, before mass media forced grand-scale advertising from brick walls to the television screen. In documenting a fading but valuable traditional art form, this book fills a gap in both the cultural fabric of Arkansas towns and the history of American art.

Elizabeth Hadaway doesn’t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for performance. Sparkling with shout-outs to Beowulf and Keats, varied meters, and surprising rhymes, she lifts centuries of hurt and anger into a contrary music. Her reach is vast, including everything from T. S. Eliot to the swans on her vinyl lace shower curtains. She warns us off from stereotypes and misconceptions about Appalachia and the South. Here are short lyrics and long narratives, poems about ballads, baton twirling, hound dogs, Shelley, and NASCAR stars. In “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Car, of Dale Earnhardt at Daytona,” she writes about a memorial T-shirt, “his face folded, half / in love with asphalt death.” Fire Baton announces the debut of a talented new poet of wit, vivacity, and color. And no matter how far she roams, she never lets us forget her roots, that she comes from a place “where where’s whirr.”

A much-revered icon of jazz, Dave Brubeck is, as Doug Ramsey calls him, “one of the most celebrated and successful jazz musicians of all time.”

It’s About Time, Fred Hall’s biography, explores the many influences on Brubeck’s life and music: his youth on a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Sierras; a stint in Europe with Patton’s army during World War II; the development of the West Coast jazz scene and the rise of the Dave Brubeck Quartet; musical relationships with Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright, Joe Morello, and many more jazz greats; his phenomenal experiments with polytonality and polyrhythm; his fifty-three-year marriage to Iola, manager, collaborator, and mother of their six children; and important career breakthroughs, such as the first-ever million-selling jazz single, “Take Five.”

Including an annotated discography, It’s About Time is much more than an upbeat examination of the Brubeck phenomenon. It is also a penetrating view of the culture, the music, the musicians, the recording industry, and race relations of the country and the century that gave birth to jazz.

2009 Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award; Finalist for the 2008 Independent Booksellers’ Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award; co-winner in the gay poetry category from Lambda Book Awards.

A family in the aftermath of violence These raw and powerful poems have at their heart the charged, archetypal figure of the mother. Conflicted by the twin desires of self-destruction and self-preservation, this mother is both terrible and beautiful. This compassionate, nervy collection of poems shows a family in the aftermath of violence. James Allen Hall explores themes of loss, the intersection of grief and desire, and the ways in which history, art, and politics shape the self. We meet the speaker's mother in many guises-she is the rogue Republic of Texas, the titular character of Rosemary's Baby, a nineteenth century artist's model, a fake entry in an encyclopedia, the lost queen of King Lear. With clarity, wit, and compassion, the speaker discovers the facets of his mother-her own abuse, her years of adultery, her struggle to remain independent-so that he may come to terms with his own sexuality. By seeing his mother in these guises, the speaker understands identity as it develops along and is reclaimed from the most repressive of social margins. Hall's poems twine the autobiographical impulse with a deeper emotional, somewhat surreal, temperament. This is a book as much about the way we tell our stories as it is about the stories we tell. Now You're the Enemy negotiates narrative in order to refashion the self-as a way to survive, to learn the redemptive power of love.

In this diverse collection of stories derived from interviews, Arkansans who lived through the greatest global conflict of the century share their memories with unaffected candor. From those who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Tarawa to those who labored on the home front, the larger story of World War II emerges, a story full of heroism and tenacity, horror and triumph. The distinct voice of the person interviewed rises from each story in straightforward language that is frequently modest and humble, at times joyful, and often still dismayed at the scope and fury of the war. Through these voices, one can begin to understand how Americans dealt with the immense changes that occurred as their nation emerged from the Great Depression and joined the other Allied forces to win a war of incomparable scale and consequence.

A century ago Hot Springs, Arkansas, was a world-renown resort city. Today, the town remains the most unique city in Arkansas but with much of its Victorian-to-1950s views nearly unrecognizable. Hot Springs: Past and Present shows vividly the before and after of hundreds of sites, answering questions such as “What used to be on this corner?” and “What was here before it was a parking lot?” The answer to those questions is often an opulent hotel, a theater, a bathhouse, a gambling house, or a mansion. Fire destroyed many buildings, even more were demolished, and some sites remain not so unlike they used to be. Hot Springs: Past and Present makes a perfect walking companion for anyone visiting the town and wishing to learn more about this one-of-a-kind place through not only the photographs but also the informative text that provides a good overview of the town’s history.

Hot Springs National Park was recognized nationally in 2010 when the U.S. Mint unveiled the design of the first quarter of 56 in a series called the America the Beautiful Quarters Program. In 1903 a Chicago magazine, The 400, told its upscale readers about Hot Springs, Arkansas. The article's author wrote, "I also perceive a Chicago-Hot Springs air line of macadamized highway, lined with meteoric automobiles ribboning off the 750 miles between the cities in a thousand or less minutes. The perspective is almost delirious." Such exuberant words are testimony to what Hot Springs, "a place apart," has been to the nation since the early European explorers found vapors rising from the thermal springs-47 of them from which a million gallons of 143-degree water flow each day. A Place Apart offers readers a balanced history in words and historic photographs of a unique locale in the state of Arkansas. The hot springs of what the Native Americans called Washita were on the national map of Pres. Thomas Jefferson when the United States acquired what would become Arkansas in the Louisiana Purchase of 1804. Congress created the Hot Springs Reservation in 1832-the first land that the federal government set aside for preservation-granting federal protection of the thermal waters, and renamed it Hot Springs National Park in 1921. This book provides a fascinating visual history of pioneers, wealthy barons, scoundrels, gamblers (including such frequent visitors as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano), colorful politicians, and the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the spa city in hopes of regaining their fleeting health. Also covered are such famous attractions as Oaklawn Park, a thoroughbred horse-racing track, and Bathhouse Row, with its eight turn-of-the-century historic buildings.

Donald Harington, best known for his fifteen novels, was also a prolific writer of essays, articles, and book reviews.

The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany gathers a career-spanning and eclectic selection of nonfiction by the Arkansawyer novelist Donald Harington that reveals how a life of devastating losses and disappointments inspired what the Boston Globe called the “quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters.”

This extensive collection of interviews and other works of prose—many of which are previously unpublished—offers glimpses into Harington’s life, loves, and favorite obsessions, replays his minor (and not so minor) dramas with literary critics, and reveals the complicated and sometimes contentious relationship between his work of the writers he most admired. The Guestroom Novelist, which takes its title from an essay that serves as a love letter to his fellow underappreciated writers, paints a rich portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged, and fiercely funny old man, as well as comic, sentimentalist, philosopher, and critic, paying testimony to the writer’s magnificent ability to transform the seemingly crude stuff of our material existence into enduring art.

Swindler. Murderer. Scoundrel.

Robert Boatright was one of Middle America’s greatest confidence men. Although little remembered today, his story provides a rare glimpse into America’s criminal past. Working in concert with a local bank and an influential Democratic boss, “this dean of modern confidence men” and his colorful confederacy of con men known as the Buckfoot Gang seemed untouchable. A series of missteps, however, led to a string of court cases across the country that brought Boatright’s own criminal enterprise to an end. And yet, the con continued: Boatright’s successor, John C. Mabray, and his cronies, many of whom had been in the Buckfoot Gang, preyed upon victims across North America in one of the largest midwestern criminal syndicates in history before they were brought to heel.

Like the works of Sinclair Lewis, Boatright’s story exposes a rift in the wholesome midwestern stereotype and furthers our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society.

White Man's Heaven is the first book to investigate the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper shows how an established tradition of extralegal violence and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era combined to create an environment that resulted in interracial violence. Even though some whites tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

Thomas Hauser's recording of the contemporary boxing scene has become the sport's most eagerly anticipated written work. Here's what readers are saying about And the New . . . "Masterful, as always . . . Awesome writing." "On a scale of one to ten, Hauser rates one hundred." "The most accurate, honest, and insightful writing about boxing that I've ever read." "Thomas Hauser is in a league of his own." "It doesn't get any better than this. Another five-star article from Hauser." "Brilliant, enlightening, and wonderful. This is what boxing writing should be." "Another great article from a truly great writer." Booklist says that Thomas Hauser is "the most respected boxing journalist working today and perhaps the best ever." Robert Lipsyte calls him "the best boxing writer of our time." And the New . . . is the latest compilation of Hauser's classic writing. It brings readers into the dressing room with fighters like Manny Pacquiao and Sergio Martinez in the moments before the year's biggest fights. Hauser's award-winning investigative journalism exposes the inner workings of HBO Sports and the economic realities that drive boxing today. There's a look back in time at the incomparable Henry Armstrong, and much more.

This is the second collection of articles on professional boxing to be published in book form by acclaimed writer Thomas Hauser. It offers unique insights into Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Shane Mosely, Ray Jones Jr. and many more superstars, as well as an insider's critique of the sweet science today. Satirical, whimsical, and pungent, Hauser deftly maps the politics and poli-tricks of the world's only true universal sport.

Originally published in 1986 (McGraw-Hill), The Black Lights was the first book that fully explored the sport and business of professional boxing. Upon joining the training camp of superlightweight Billy Costello, Thomas Hauser was given unprecedented access to the fighter, his manager, and trainer as well as to the real heavyweights of the boxing world, promoter Don King, and World Boxing Council president Jose Sulaiman. The result, according to Playboy in their review of the original, is a book that "explains why fighters fight, what they go through to win, and how they feel when they lose. It is a great book." In this gracefully written, fast-paced narrative, the author slips quietly into the background and gives us a firsthand look at a business that is often cruel and exploitative and a sport that is at once violent and beautiful. As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, The Black Lights provides ammunition for both sides in the debate over boxing: "Hauser has written what is clearly the most complete and fairminded work on the subject to date." In an age when the controversy surrounding the evils and merits of boxing still rages, this classic account is more timely than ever.

Thomas Hauser has become “must reading” in the boxing community, and his latest book demonstrates why. Boxing Is . . . brings together all of Hauser’s 2009 articles. In them, Hauser illuminates the behind-the-scenes stories of the year’s most memorable personalities and events. He takes us from Manny Pacquiao’s dressing room in the tense moments before 2009’s biggest fight to an in-depth portrait of the incomparable Sugar Ray Robinson, all the while continuing to show why his annual collections, avidly anticipated by fans and critics alike, have become, according to columnist Bart Barry, “an essential part of boxing’s official record and the chronicles of this era most likely to endure.”

Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to Thomas Hauser’s newest collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. As Booklist has proclaimed, “Many journalists have written fine boxing pieces, but none has written as extensively or as memorably as Thomas Hauser. . . . Hauser remains the current champion of boxing. . . . Hauser is a treasure.”

Broken Dreams meets this high standard with its coverage of 2020’s most important fighters and fights, outside-the-ring controversies, regulatory missteps, and other issues that defined the year’s boxing scene. Hauser explores the heavyweight trio of Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, and Deontay Wilder in depth, as well as Canelo Álvarez and historic greats like Jack Dempsey, Carlos Monzon, and Muhammad Ali.

Hauser also tackles the larger social challenges that imposed themselves so assertively in 2020, including the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, runaway social media, the presidential election, and other forces that left a deep imprint on the sport and business of boxing.

Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to Thomas Hauser’s newest collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. Reviewing his 2018 collection, Booklist proclaimed, “This is Hauser in a nutshell: compassion, character, and context. As always, an annual delight.”

A Dangerous Journey continues Hauser’s tradition of excellence, turning his award-winning investigative reporting skills on the scandal surrounding the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs and the failures of corrupt and incompetent state athletic commissions. Hauser also takes readers into Canelo Alvarez’s dressing room in the hours before and after his rematch against Gennady Golovkin, the biggest fight of the year, and offers in-depth portraits of boxing’s biggest stars—past and present—as well as reflections on fight-related curiosities ranging from Ronda Rousey to David and Goliath.

Thirty-five years ago, Hauser began writing about boxing with his superb The Black Lights, which has long been regarded as a boxing classic. He only gets better.

Over the years, Thomas Hauser has earned recognition as one of the most respected boxing writers in America and the definitive chronicler of the contemporary boxing scene. The Greatest Sport of All is Hauser’s portrait of 2006, another remarkable year in boxing. The book includes an inside look at great fighters, great fights, and the powers behind the throne. There are revealing portraits of Oscar De La Hoya, Jermain Taylor, Bernard Hopkins, and Don King; a look back at giants like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; and more.

In 2015, Booklist observed, “the arrival of Hauser’s annual boxing review is akin to Christmas morning for fight fans. Nobody knows a sport any better than Hauser knows boxing.”

Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike look forward to Thomas Hauser’s annual collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. He’s one of the last real champions of boxing and one of the very best who has ever written about the sport.

A Hard World continues this tradition of excellence with dressing-room reports from big fights like Canelo Alvarez vs. Miguel Cotto, a behind-the-scenes look at Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao, and a foray into the world of mixed martial arts for a compelling portrait of Ronda Rousey. Most importantly, this new collection contains Hauser’s groundbreaking two-part investigative report on the relationship between the United States Anti-Doping Agency and boxing, a report that shook the industry and raised fundamental questions regarding the integrity of USADA’s drug-testing procedures as applied to boxing.

A Hurting Sport marks the tenth annual volume of Thomas Hauser’s boxing articles to be published by the University of Arkansas Press. Every year, readers, sportswriters, and critics alike look forward to these collections. In 2014, Booklist observed, “This annual series detailing the year in boxing should be a highlight, not only for fans of the sport but also for those who appreciate journalistic acumen and stylish prose.”

Other sportswriters have called Hauser “the dean of fightwriters” (TheSweetScience.com) and “our craft’s most celebrated practitioner” (15Rounds.com). His readers call him one of the last real champions in boxing and one of the very best who has ever written about this sport.

A Hurting Sport continues this tradition of excellence with a behind-the-scenes recounting of 2014’s biggest fights, a look at Floyd Mayweather’s conduct in and out of the ring, analysis of fight impresario Al Haymon’s burgeoning empire, and much more.

When Thomas Hauser was selected for induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2019, his relationship with Muhammad Ali was widely cited. But Ali was just one of the many fighters who have shared momentous times with Hauser. For decades, elite fighters like Evander Holyfield, Manny Pacquiao, Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins, Ricky Hatton, Kelly Pavlik, Sergio Martínez, Jermain Taylor, Miguel Cotto, Gennady Golovkin, and Canelo Álvarez have welcomed him into their dressing rooms to record their journeys on fight night.

Gathering and updating more than thirty essays from Hauser’s critically acclaimed yearly collections, In the Inner Sanctum celebrates these most dramatic hours in boxers’ lives. In each account, Hauser chronicles the very moment when a fighter’s physical well-being and financial future are on the line—when the fighter is most at risk and most alive.

“Hauser is a treasure. Whatever he writes is worth reading. Boxing is blessed that he has focused so much of his career on the sweet science.”
—Booklist

Each year, readers, writers, and critics alike anticipate Thomas Hauser’s newest collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene, where his award-winning investigative journalism is on display. The annual retrospective of the previous year in boxing is always a notable moment in the sport that no one knows better than Hauser.
Protect Yourself at All Times offers a behind-the-scenes look at Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor, dressing room reports from big fights like Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin, and compelling portraits of luminaries like Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Mike Tyson, and Don King, all filtered through the perspective of a true champion of boxing.

Thomas Hauser is well known to readers as Muhammad Ali's biographer and for his recording of the contemporary boxing scene. But Hauser began his writing career in the political arena as the author of Missing, a novel later made into an AcademyAward-winning film starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. He has written books on subjects as diverse as public education, moral values, and Chernobyl, and his articles have appeared in publications ranging from the New Yorker to Penthouse. Reflections brings together all of Hauser's articles on subjects other than sports. The book begins with a never-published essay on the Beatles. It then takes readers on a remarkable journey that moves from an exploration of racism, religion, and other hot-button political issues to personal memories and reflections on the origins of Santa Claus and the Tiffany box. Combining personal memories with issue-oriented commentary, Reflections creates a portrait of some of the most remarkable people and most compelling issues of our time.

Commenting on Thomas Hauser's annual collections of articles on boxing, Ring Magazine declared, "What makes Hauser's stories so extraordinary is that the man many consider 'The Dean of Boxing Writers' refuses to allow his admiration for the sport to blind him to its dark side. His annual volumes on boxing have become required reading for hardcore and casual fans alike." Straight Writes and Jabs is the latest in the popular series. It brings readers into the dressing room with elite champions in the moments before some of 2012's biggest fights. Hauser's award-winning investigative journalism is on display in a groundbreaking exposé of the use of performance-enhancing drugs. There's a look back in time at the incomparable Archie Moore and much more. Thomas Hauser is the author of forty-five books. His first work, Missing, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. He later authored Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, the definitive biography of the most famous fighter ever. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism.

In 2016, Booklist observed, “Thomas Hauser is a treasure. Whatever he writes is worth reading. Boxing is blessed that he has focused so much of his career on the sweet science.”

There Will Always Be Boxing continues this tradition of excellence. A poignant look at Muhammad Ali—whose life was celebrated throughout the world following his death on June 3, 2016—highlights this collection of Hauser’s work. The year’s biggest fights are, as always, put in perspective. And once again, Hauser takes readers behind the scenes, giving them a seat at the table with boxing’s biggest power brokers as he reveals the inner workings of the sport and business of boxing.

There Will Always Be Boxing is sure not to disappoint the readers, writers, and critics who look forward to Hauser’s annual collection of articles about the contemporary boxing scene. This collection shows, once again, why Hauser is one of the last real champions of boxing and one of the very best who has ever written about the sport.

 

Booklist called Straight Writes and Jabs, last year’s collection of boxing articles by Thomas Hauser, “wonderful writing from a world-class journalist.” This year’s collection, Thomas Hauser on Boxing, is the latest in the popular annuals bringing together all Hauser’s writing from the previous year. Readers will enter the dressing room with elite champions in the moments before some of 2013’s biggest fights. Hauser’s award-winning investigative journalism is on display in his prize-winning exposé of the tragedy that befell heavyweight boxer Magomed Abdusalamov. There’s a look at the incomparable Don King in the twilight of his career, and much more.

Thomas Hauser is best known as Muhammad Ali's biographer and for his recording of the contemporary boxing scene. Booklist called Hauser "the most respected boxing journalist working today and perhaps the best ever." Robert Lipsyte said Hauser is "the best boxing writer of our time." Still, Hauser's love of sports began not with boxing but with baseball. Long before he turned to the sweet science, America's national pastime had captured his heart. His childhood allegiance was to the New York Yankees. Growing up in the suburbs of New York, he cheered for the Giants in football and Knicks in basketball. In college, the often-hapless Columbia Lions became his cause. Thomas Hauser on Sports brings together Hauser's articles on sports other than boxing. It combines personal memories with issue-oriented commentary and an intimate look at some of the most remarkable athletes of modern times. Hauser has dealt one-on-one with Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, Pete Rose, Arthur Ashe, Wilt Chamberlain, and other giants of sports. He has crossed swords with the likes of Marvin Miller and Howard Cosell. Thomas Hauser on Sports is a remarkable journey that begins in the days of Hauser's youth and follows the games we play into the era of steroids and multi-billion-dollar television contracts.

Thomas Hauser has become “must reading” in the boxing community, and his latest book demonstrates why. An Unforgiving Sport brings together Hauser’s 2008 articles from secondsout.com and espn.com, in which he exposes the inner workings of HBO Sports, goes behind the scenes at boxing’s biggest fights, revisits historical figures like John L. Sullivan, and offers revealing portraits of Don King, Oscar De La Hoya, Manny Pacquiao, Ricky Hatton, Bernard Hopkins, and a host of others. Booklist praised an earlier collection of Hauser’s articles as “one more testament to [Hauser’s] talent and passion for the most elemental of our sports.” An Unforgiving Sport adds to Hauser’s definitive record of the contemporary boxing scene.

Thomas Hauser's annual collections have been avidly anticipated from the time A Beautiful Sickness was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2001 until his most recent collection, Boxing Is . . . , was named a 2010 Best Sports Book of the Year by Booklist, which has called Hauser "the current champ in boxing literature." Sportswriter Donald McRae recently wrote, "Thomas Hauser has become boxing's indispensable writer with a stream of books and internet columns that strip away the layers of intrigue to reveal a seamy but addictive world. Whether writing Muhammad Ali's biography, or shredding boxing's power brokers, Hauser instills passion and gravitas into his work." Winks and Daggers continues that tradition with Hauser's writing from 2010. Hauser brings readers into Manny Pacquiao's intimate circle in the moments before last year's two biggest fights. His award-winning investigative journalism exposes the inner workings of HBO Sports and examines the use of performance-enhancing drugs in boxing. There's a look back in time at Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Leonard. And there's much more in this latest collection in the series that has become, according to reviewer Bart Barry, "an essential part of boxing's official record and the chronicles of this era most likely to endure."

Acclaimed boxing writer Thomas Hauser admires the sweet science, but he also recognizes and confronts its problems. His essays here portray the sport in all its glory and gore, its grace and disgrace.

Hauser tracks the effects of big money on the sport, exposes corruption at the highest levels, and examines the emotional links between the September 11 attack on America and the way we experience the violence of boxing. He follows the biggest fighters and the most important fights through 2001 into the early months of 2002. He also depicts the broadcasters, government regulators, and others-the people behind the scenes who shape boxing without ever taking a punch. We meet fighters such as Lennox Lewis, Mike Tyson, and Bernard Hopkins, and non-combatants like ringside physician Margaret Goodman, trainer Eddie Futch, and the powers that be at HBO.

Praise for Thomas Hauser’s writing about professional boxing:

New York Times: Incomparable and indispensable.
Washington Post: Brilliantly crafted.
New York Daily News:The best writing so far on the business of boxing.
Boxing Collectors’ News: A. J. Liebling’s current-day successor.
Ring Magazine: No one has ever done it better.

In Story Hour, Hay takes many well-known—"Jack and the Beanstalk," "Beauty and the Beast," "Little Red Riding Hood"—and turns them on end. Whether quickening our memory to the darkness only hinted at before or highlighting the great joke we never caught, her poems always invite us back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we know so well."

This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes’s is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864. Haynes’s memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Among his writings, Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of Texas and thus became a hunted man. He also tells of his harrowing odyssey to reach Union troops in Louisiana. Every step of the way, Haynes provides details, sometimes graphic, of the harassment and cruelty he and many others like him suffered at the hands of his Confederate neighbors.

Based on an exhibition organized by Joachim Pissarro and curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Lauren Haynes, Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today explores the complex and varied connections between crystal and art throughout the world. Included are both ancient artifacts—such as engraved gems, figurines, and vases—and works from contemporary artists around the world that explore the power of crystal in art by drawing on its form, properties, and mysterious qualities. Featuring more than sixty-five works from ancient Egypt and Greece, through to Rome, China, India, Japan, the Middle East, the Americas, and beyond, this book invites readers to discover how the power of crystal transcends the boundaries of time and space.

Taken together, all of these objects illustrate how crystal has bridged the gap between things we can see and things we can’t: science and art, fact and faith, medicine and magic—the visible and the invisible.

Published in collaboration with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and University of Arkansas School of Art.

 

With each new collection of poems, Samuel Hazo explores themes of mortality and love, passion and art, courage and grace in a style that is unmistakably his own. In As They Sail, he writes with equal feeling and clarity about political and artistic figures and the complex synchronicity between life and art. He is extremely interested in the wonderment and discovery that emerges in the act of writing, in the movement toward wisdom that results from expression of feeling.

Questioning is always more important in his writing than answering. Hazo has the ability to accomplish what he attributes to another poet, Charles Causley, in “When Nothing’s Happening, Everything’s Happening”: “. . . the poems borne of his pen / . . . help us to feel what we think.” He is able to achieve this “felt thought” without any trace of self-absorption or sentimentality.

Whether Hazo is writing about Nixon, Hemingway, or Brando or simply about walking in France, he finds the essence of language that gives rise to an emotional response. In a time when poetry without emotion is praised and language is said to make sense simply because it exists on the page, Hazo’s clear voice and concern with the nature of love, time, change, and the meaning of the past is uniquely refreshing.

Architects of Globalism provides the first comprehensive analysis of American Blueprints for the reconstruction of the world after the defeat of Hitler and his allies. Working closely with Roosevelt and Truman, State Department officials assumed primary responsibility for drafting these plans. Hearden shows that bitter rivalries frequently divided these officials, but that there was remarkable agreement among them on fundamental principles. These architects of globalism sought to create a liberal capitalist world system, in which foreign markets would absorb the surplus products of American farms and factories so that the United States would be able to maintain high levels of employment without further government intervention in the economy. Hearden shows these men contending with the vital issues of the day: decolonization and the dismantling of empires, relations with the Soviet Union, the formation of the United Nations, the economic reconstruction of war-torn countries, the forging of new relations with Germany and Japan, the twin problems of Palestine and petroleum. Based on extensive new research in primary sources — from policymakers' private letters and personal diaries to official correspondence — this exciting book documents the formation of the postwar world.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett's new collection considers, from close and afar, the elemental forces coming to bear on human character in our time. In one sense a personal explication of a long marriage and its betrayal, these stunning poems take solace in nature's steadfastness, and in the prospect of a newly resilient self, awakened to the predicament of a battered world. The title poem spills across the face of history—9/11, Hiroshima, the harrowing geological formation of earth, the sudden appearance of cave art, and ultimately, the uncertainty of God. The Daphne and Apollo sequence invents fourteen speakers, including a chisel, a river god, the sculptor, Bernini, and the poet, Ovid, each telling his own story as together they deconstruct the longstanding myth of lust gone awry. Such is the imaginative, kaleidoscopic process of Rift, in which acts of observation shatter and shift our view of experience. While we ache for the loss in these poems, Helfgott Hyett risks such honest grief that redemption comes, free standing and moral, on its own.

From the humble beginnings in 1894, to the great programs of Frank Broyles, the National Championship in 1964, and Lou Holtz's Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma in 1978, and then to Arkansas's recent re-entry into the national rankings with bowl invitations—the whole spectrum of Hog football is covered in this lively chronicle.

Winner, 2020 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award, Edited Volume

Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles?

Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.

he popular Encyclopedia of the Blues, first published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1992 and reprinted six times, has become an indispensable reference source for all involved with or intrigued by the music. The work alphabetizes hundreds of biographical entries, presenting detailed examinations of the performers and of the instruments, trends, recordings, and producers who have created and popularized this truly American art form.

A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas tells the extraordinary story of Peter Caulder, a free African American settler in the Arkansas Territory. After serving as a rifleman in the war of 1812, Caulder established a community of free-born African Americans in northern Arkansas and was largely accepted by his white neighbors until an 1859 expulsion law forced the community to flee the state and settle in Missouri. Like many frontier people, Peter Caulder was unschooled and signed his name only with a mark. To document such a man’s life, and to determine how he thrived within a slave society and came to join a free black backwoods community, Billy Higgins has skillfully interwoven oft-neglected primary sources—many of which are reproduced here—from around the country; and through the information revealed in censuses, tax records, sutler’s account books, army returns, folk stories, land warrants, traveler’s journals, and newspaper notices, a fascinating—and groundbreaking—account of Caulder, his family, his friends, and his community has emerged.

Contributors: Lynne Rudder Baker, Ned Block, Fred Dretske, Ivan Fox, Joseph Levine, Eric Lormand, Jeff McConnell, Brian P. McLaughlin, John O’Leary-Hawthorne, Georges Rey, Mark Richard, David M. Rosenthal, Carol Rovane, Michael Slote, Joseph Thomas Tolliver, Robert Van Gulick, Stephen Webb, Stephen L. White, and Daniel Dennett.

In this newly researched and synthesized history of the Cherokees, Hoig traces the displacement of the tribe and the Trail of Tears, the great trauma of the Civil War, the destruction of tribal autonomy, and the Cherokee people's phoenix-like rise in political and social stature during the twentieth century.

These poems are the best poems from Jonathan Holden's first seven books, four of which have won significant national competitions: Design for a House (The Devins Award, 1972), Leverage (The AWP Award Series, 1982), The Names of the Rapids (The Juniper Prize, 1985), and The Sublime (The Vassar Miller Prize, 1995). Holden's command of language is staggering, and his range of subjects is extensive. He writes about sex, mathematics, nationalism, propaganda, baseball, and blackmail with an emotional honesty that pushes his observations in surprising directions that the reader can never anticipate. These poems have a sustained leanness and concentrated power. Holden is a craftsman whose poems carry one along with the vigor and the inevitability of rapids and the illumination of chain lightning. His dramatic lyrics, like those of the late Richard Hugo, evoke a quality of light in the studied landscapes whose common denominator is solitude but where, through art, beauty and the heartening sense of human community can coexist.

Our appreciation of American poetry is as influenced by the personas presented in the poems as by public perception of the poets themselves. Emily Dickinson peeking from behind a doorway with large dark eyes is an indelible image superimposed over her spare, enigmatic poems. The grand gestures of Walt Whitman's voice have much to do with our reading of "Song of Myself." And we cannot hear "Mending Wall" or "Mowing" without thinking of the image of the rustic, sly farmer-poet that Robert Frost so carefully cultivated. The moral authority of the poet reveals itself through the poems as well, and it is crucial to the meaning of the poem, Holden argues, if art is to elevate life. Part 1 of The Old Formalism,"The Practice," is a close study of some of the conventions and developments in contemporary American poetry, with such topics as "sex and poetry" "rhetoricity," and "sensibility." Holden shows lucidly how character—or lack of it—is revealed in poetry. In "Personae," the second part, he gives a studied reading of a group of several admired poets, such as Richard Hugo, Mary Kinzie, Ted Kooser, and William Stafford. Holden uses biographical references and personal contacts with the poets to strengthen the notion of character revealed in poetry. This book takes a decided stand in the ongoing debate of the past two decades about the relationship of American poetry to American culture. In an age when image dominates word, and the business of poetry is nearly as celebrity-laden as Hollywood, Holden takes us past the media glitz, backstage where the poems are waiting to be read. Quite simply, in a clear, incisive manner, he teaches us how to read well again.

In The Second Great Emancipation, Donald Holley uses statistical and narrative analysis to demonstrate that farm mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi after the region’s population of farm laborers moved away for new opportunities. Rather than pushing labor off the land, Holley argues, the mechanical cotton picker enabled the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, opening the door for the civil rights movement, while ushering a period of prosperity into the South.

Attachment to the familiar and the challenge of leaving it for new horizons link the poems in this collection by Margaret Holley. The poems are full of feeling and wisdom in equal parts, and are enriched and informed by the poet’s landscape, whether it is Switzerland or Arizona. The landscape, in fact, becomes a kind of mirror we gaze into to see the future that at every turn is approaching and moving through us to illuminate the past. The journey of this book shows how the conditions of our lives are illumined by our cultural forbears—Goethe, Chopin, Nietzsche, Bonnard, Klee—by the heritage of personal memory, and by the ever amazing “book of nature.” A book remarkable for the complete authenticity of its feeling and candor, Walking Through the Horizon shows us the simultaneity of the past and the future and is grounds for hopefulness and joy: “These are gifts worth passing on: / the beckoning vista, the sudden frontier, / the rivers of days and years to come.”

Adopted by the State of Arkansas for 2008 Once again, the State of Arkansas has adopted An Arkansas History for Young People as an official textbook for middle-level and/or junior-high-school Arkansas-history classes. This fourth edition incorporates new research done after extensive consultations with middle-level and junior-high teachers from across the state, curriculum coordinators, literacy coaches, university professors, and students themselves. It includes a multitude of new features and is now full color throughout. This edition has been completely redesigned and now features a modern format and new graphics suitable for many levels of student readers. The completely revised fourth edition includes new unit, chapter, and section divisions as well as five brand-new chapters: an introductory chapter with information on the symbols, flag, and songs of Arkansas; chapter 2, which covers the geography of Arkansas; chapter 3, on state and local government; chapter four, on economics and tourism; and a “modern” chapter on the Arkansas of today and the future, which completes the learning adventure. This edition also has two “special features”: one on the Central High School crisis of 1957 and another on the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. It also has new and interesting features for students like the “Guide to Reading” (at the beginning of each chapter, there is a list of important terms, people, places and events for the student to keep in mind as he or she reads [corresponding to blue vocabulary words in the text, which are define in the margin]), “County Quest,” “I Am an Arkansan,” “Did You Know?” “Only in Arkansas,” “A Day in the Life,” “Chapter Reflection” questions and activities, over forty-five new content maps, and a comprehensive new map atlas.

In Robyn Horn’s thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn’s primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.

The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.

 

The job of regional literature is twofold: to explore and confront the culture from within, and to help define that culture for outsiders. Taken together, the two centuries of Ozarks literature collected in this ambitious anthology do just that. The fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama presented in The Literature of the Ozarks complicate assumptions about backwoods ignorance, debunk the pastoral myth, expand on the meaning of wilderness, and position the Ozarks as a crossroads of human experience with meaningful ties to national literary movements.

Among the authors presented here are an Osage priest, an early explorer from New York, a native-born farm wife, African American writers who protested attacks on their communities, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and an art history professor who created a fictional town and a postmodern parody of the region’s stereotypes.

The Literature of the Ozarks establishes a canon as nuanced and varied as the region’s writers themselves.

Finalist, 1995 National Book Award

From the time the Waverly first steamed up the White River to Batesville from the Mississippi River in 1831, the haunting blast of river whistles signaled service, comfort, and delight for residents along this major Arkansas waterway. In a terrain that lacked good roads, steamboats contributed significantly to new economic development and settlement of the region. They carried animal hides, cotton, and rendered bear oil downriver to market and transported settlers, food staples, and manufactured goods upriver. For a hundred years these elegant boats were used for mail delivery, excursion parties, and freight hauling, eventually bringing about their own demise when they hauled in the material to build the railroads.

Over 120 black-and-white photographs, sketches, and maps illustrate the colorful text. Interwoven with the history of steamboats is that of ferries keelboats, flatboats, and Civil War tinclads, all of which plied the White River in the 1800s and early 1900s. A keenly researched regional study, this book is nonetheless representative of conditions and activities on similar river systems in many parts of America during the same period. Steamboats and Ferries on the White River pays lasting tribute to the golden age of steam travel.

Of the several hundred Americans who joined the Royal Air Force during the First World War, twenty-eight became aces by shooting down five or more aircraft. Unfortunately, those American aces who flew only with the British are little known by the American public. In Clouds of Glory tells the story of these fliers in the first air war, young men who risked their lives and citizenship to help the British fight off the German squadrons. An exhaustively researched study, In Clouds of Glory restores these American heroes to the place in history they had so bravely earned.

From its first poem, “String,” with its mythic overtones to the final “The Movement of Ice,” August Evening with Trumpet deals with the varieties of surprise and mystery, pain and wonder in the human experience. In constant motion, this collection ranges across a broad landscape, one in which trout swim through a house, where a coal miner father on vacation digs clams, where an old mother refuses help as she walks a narrow plank across a brook, and where in the quietly moving “Late November,” the speaker releases a raccoon from a leg-hold steel trap.

Uncluttered, clear, and direct, the poems move effortlessly and seamlessly into one another, gathering an overall pleasing unity and narrative energy. And if there is a vein of quiet sorrow and darkness running through the collection, it is balanced against courage, grace, and good humor. At the book’s center is a deep reverence for childhood, for parents, for children, for language, and for landscape, all of which Humes admirably holds up for us. Harry Humes’s work brings to mind William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”

Winner, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.