Buy Books: Browse by Season: Spring 2016

In Known for My Work, Lynda Morgan looks beyond slavery’s legacy of racial and economic inequality and counters the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom. By examining African American social and intellectual thought, Morgan highlights how slaves built an ethos of "honest labor" and collective humanism. As moral economists, slaves and their descendants insisted that economic motives formed the foundation of their exploitation and made sophisticated arguments about the appropriate role of labor in a just and democratic society.

The late Pleistocene-early Holocene landscape hosted more species and greater numbers of them in the Southeast compared to any other region in North America at that time. Yet James Dunbar posits that a misguided reliance on using Old World origins to validate New World evidence has stalled research in this area. Rejecting the one-size-fits-all approach to Pleistocene archaeological sites, Dunbar analyzes five areas of contextual data--stratigraphy; chronology; paleoclimate; the combined consideration of habitat, resource availability, and subsistence; and artifacts and technology--to resolve unanswered questions surrounding the Paleoindian occupation of the Americas.

Fritz Müller (1821-1897), though not as well known as his colleague Charles Darwin, belongs in the cohort of great nineteenth-century naturalists. Recovering Müller's legacy, David A. West describes the close intellectual kinship between Müller and Darwin and details a lively correspondence that spanned seventeen years.

The Cold War was one of the twentieth century's defining events, with long-lasting political, social, and material implications. It created a global landscape of culturally and politically significant artifacts and sites that are critical to understanding and preserving the history of that conflict. The stories of these artifacts and sites remain mostly untold, however, because so many of the facilities operated in secret.

In May 1945, activists staged a "wade-in" at a whites-only beach in Miami, protesting the Jim Crow-era laws that denied blacks access to recreational waterfront areas. Pressured by protestors in this first postwar civil rights demonstration, the Dade County Commission ultimately designated the difficult-to-access Virginia Key as a beach for African Americans. The beach became vitally important to the community, offering a place to congregate with family and friends and to enjoy the natural wonders of the area. It was also a tangible victory in the continuing struggle for civil rights in public space.

The Powhatan Landscape breaks new ground by tracing Native placemaking in the Chesapeake from the Algonquian arrival to the Powhatan's clashes with the English. Martin Gallivan details how Virginia Algonquians constructed riverine communities alongside fishing grounds and collective burials and later within horticultural towns. Ceremonial spaces, including earthwork enclosures within the center place of Werowocomoco, gathered people for centuries prior to 1607. Even after the violent ruptures of the colonial era, Native people returned to riverine towns for pilgrimages commemorating the enduring power of place.

Aftermath: The Fallout of War--America and the Middle East captures the response of artists to the impact of war on people and their environments. Writers, poets, and photographers band together to transform destruction into enlightenment, aggression into empathy, and scars into hope.

The multinational contributors have a broad range of professional experience as urbanists, historians, and architects. Many are globally renowned for their design work, and some are published here in English for the first time. They examine how humans negotiate with their existing surroundings and how built form expresses that relationship.