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8 books match the query 'Fox, William L.'

cover of Envoy to the Archives: Ruth Anna Fisher and Hidden Transatlantic History

Envoy to the Archives

Ruth Anna Fisher and Hidden Transatlantic History

William L. Fox

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

How a pioneering manuscript librarian and intellectual uncovered buried records that reshaped America’s past 

As the London-based agent of the US Library of Congress, Ruth Anna Fisher (1886–1975) profoundly shaped the field of US history. Working at the British Museum and Public Record Office between the world wars, she was responsible for a vast program of identifying and copying up to a million documents related to American history, with prescient attention to the transatlantic slave trade. This monumental achievement has provided countless scholars access to source materials that might have remained hidden in repositories throughout Britian without Fisher’s brilliant discernment and tireless labor. 

In Envoy to the Archives, William L. Fox offers the first full-length biography of this remarkable American intellectual. Born to a prominent African American family in northern Ohio, Fisher was keenly aware of racial issues throughout her life. She was associated with key thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance and the twentieth century transatlantic world, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harold Laski, and J. Franklin Jameson. A trailblazer in historical research, Fisher was among a small group of Black women who first joined the ranks of professional library work, and her efforts in London coincided with the creation and consolidation of the US National Archives in the 1930s. She also mastered technologies that were new at the time, including photostat reproduction and microfilm—precursors to the many historical digitization projects of our own era. 

This engrossing biography adds to the growing body of work centered on Black women archivists, librarians, and curators. Fox draws on a wide range of archival sources, including the personal papers of prominent Black thinkers (Fisher’s were destroyed in the bombing of London in 1940), and various institutional records at the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fox also knew Fisher personally, adding warmth and insight into this captivating portrait. 

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cover of In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle

In the Desert of Desire

Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 2007

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

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cover of Mapping The Empty: Eight Artists And Nevada

Mapping The Empty

Eight Artists And Nevada

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 1999

Foreword by Jeff Kelley. Nevada's open spaces have long inspired complex responses from a population largely shaped by European sensibilities toward land and its uses. In Mapping the Empty Fox considers how eight of the state's most distinguished and innovative contemporary artists have responded to the harsh, enigmatic landscapes of the Great Basin and how, through their work, they have expressed and helped to define our attitudes toward the space we call the West. The artists are Jim McCormick, Rita Deanin Abbey, Dennis Parks, Walter McNamara, Robert Beckmann, Michael Heizer, Bill Barker, and Mary Ann Bonjorni.
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cover of Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty

Playa Works

The Myth of the Empty

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 2024

In eight brilliant essays, Fox explores many of the major playas of the American West , examining locations as diverse as Nellis Air Force Base and Frenchman Flat, where the federal government has tested experimental aircraft and atomic weaponry; the Great Salt Lake Desert, where land-speed records have been broken; and the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, site of the colorful Burning Man arts festival. He analyzes the geological and climatological conditions that created the playas and the historical role that playas played in the exploration and settlement of the West. And he offers lucid and keenly perceptive discussions of the ways that artists have responded to the playas, from the ancient makers of geoglyphs to the work of contemporary artists who have found inspiration in these enigmatic spaces, including earthworks builder Michael Heizer, photographer Richard Misrach, and painter Michael Moore. The ensemble is a compelling combination of natural history, philosophy, and art criticism, a thoughtful meditation on humankind's aversion to and fascination with the void.

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cover of Reading Sand: Selected Desert Poems, 1976-2000

Reading Sand

Selected Desert Poems, 1976-2000

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 2002

The ascetic and enigmatic expanse of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writer, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In Reading Sand, Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert—its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In "perforated object," the collection's central piece, Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the inscrutability of the Great Basin's complex past. The result is an intellectually provocative and aesthetically moving work of a lean grandeur rarely found in recent poetry
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cover of Terrae Nullius: Selected Geographies 2001-2021

Terrae Nullius

Selected Geographies 2001-2021

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 2027

The Alaska Pipeline becomes a line of poetry, a line in the land—the beginning of an epic and the end of an era. A map in the Antarctic becomes the ground beneath the reader’s feet, erasing itself with every step. A monk in a monastery beneath Mount Everest writes a prayer as the mountain traces a contrail across the upper atmosphere, inscribing a path to be followed.

In each place, William L. Fox reveals how the world leaves its mark on us—and how, through language, we move toward a sense of belonging. His spare, minimalist poems inhabit the planet’s wide empty spaces: Nevada’s Great Basin, the Antarctic and Arctic, the red deserts of interior Australia, the immense playas of Chile’s Atacama, and beyond. Between and within these lines, the poems explore how land becomes landscape, how terrain becomes territory, and how meaning is made.

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cover of The Black Rock Desert

The Black Rock Desert

Text by William L. Fox; Photographs by Mark Klett

University of Arizona Press, 2002

It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement—much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total silence—not even birds or insects live here—except when thousands of humans congregate for the Burning Man Festival on Labor Day weekend. Writer and poet William Fox has demonstrated his familiarity with the Great Basin in such respected books as Mapping the Empty, just as Mark Klett has been documenting the landscape of the American West in his acclaimed photographic studies. Now these accomplished artists turn their combined talents to an appreciation of this desolate corner of North America, where the only change in scenery comes with the shifting pattern of cracks in the earth after seasonal rains. The Black Rock Desert is a philosophical and visual meditation on an extraordinary place virtually devoid of the usual physical features one relies on for orientation and comfort. It invites readers to consider how the mind responds to a place so empty that it's both physically overpowering and psychically disorienting. Klett's photographs are austere yet innovative, admitting the vastness of the desert yet never letting us forget that traces of human passage and perception are ubiquitous. Fox's contemplative essays bring us news of both the natural desert and its cultural occupation, from the explorations of John C. Frémont to the exaltations of Burning Man. Together, Fox and Klett have forged an introspective guide to a place so daunting that few dare to venture there alone. For anyone seeking to understand how and why we perceive deserts the way we do, their book charts the rugged intersection of the American landscape and the human spirit.
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cover of The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing The Great Basin

The Void, The Grid & The Sign

Traversing The Great Basin

William L. Fox

University of Nevada Press, 2005

This is a story that few know, but those who do are its disciples. The story, of the highest and driest of all American deserts, the Great Basin, has no finer voice than that of William Fox. Fox’s book is divided into the three sections of the title. In “The Void,” he leads us through the Great Basin landscape, investigating our visual response to it—a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale of such magnitude and emptiness and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired. “The Grid” leads us on a journey through the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Frémont to the net of maps, section markers, railroads, telegraph lines, and highways that humans have thrown across the void throughout history. “The Sign” wends us through the metaphors and language we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a palimpsest where, for example, the neon boulevards of Las Vegas interplay with ancient petroglyphs. In this one-of-a-kind travel book that allows us to travel within our own neurophysiological processes as well as out into the arresting void of the Great Basin, Fox has created a dazzling new standard at the frontier of writing about the American West. His stunning and broad insight draws from the fields of natural history, cognitive psychology, art history, western history, archaeology, and anthropology, and will be of value to scholars and readers in all these subjects.
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