Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Gulf
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1956
WEBSITE: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/davisjac/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://history.ufl.edu/directory/current-faculty/jack-e-davis/ * http://users.clas.ufl.edu/davisjac/vita/brief%20vitae.htm * https://www.wuft.org/news/2017/01/01/jack-davis-sometimes-breaking-the-rules-is-a-good-thing/ * http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/books/article139492788.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 00036964
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n00036964
HEADING: Davis, Jack E., 1956-
000 00549cz a2200145n 450
001 5058937
005 20020719112600.0
008 000321n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 00036964
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC
100 1_ |a Davis, Jack E., |d 1956-
670 __ |a The civil rights movement, 2000: |b CIP t.p. (Jack E. Davis) author bio. (prof. of history, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham)
670 __ |a Phone call to author, Mar. 21, 2000 |b (b. 1956)
670 __ |a The wide brim, 2002: |b CIP t.p. (Jack E. Davis) data sheet (b. 13 July 1956)
953 __ |a lk50 |b lh39
PERSONAL
Born July 13, 1956.
EDUCATION:Brandeis University, Ph.D., 1994.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, assistant professor, 1994-97; University of Alabama, Birmingham, assistant professor, 1997-2001, director of environmental studies, associate professor, 2001-03; University of Jordan, Amman, Fulbright scholar and instructor, 2002-03; University of Florida, Gainesville, associate professor, 2003-10, Waldo W. Neikirk Term Professor, 2009-10, professor, 2010—. Founder of the publication, Alpata: A Journal of History, 2004—.
AWARDS:Charles S. Syndor Prize, Southern Historical Association, 2001, for Race against Time; gold medal, Florida Book Awards, 2009, for An Everglades Providence; Charlie Award, Florida Magazine Association, 2011, for articles in Forum; Florida Book Award Honoree, Florida’s Eden, 2013. Fellowships from organizations, including the MacDowell Colony and Seaside Institute.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including Florida Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, Public Historian, and the Journal of Sport History. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Jack E. Davis is a writer and history professor. After earning his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1994, he joined Eckerd College as an assistant professor. Davis went on to teach at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and the University of Jordan before joining the University of Florida, Gainesville in 2003. He became a full professor at the university in 2010. In 2004, he founded the scholarly publication, Alpata: A Journal of History. Davis has written books, chapters of books, and articles that have appeared in other academic journals.
Race against Time and An Everglades Providence
In 2001, Davis released Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930. This volume tracks changes in white attitudes on race in the town of Natchez, MS. Through his research, Davis discovered that whites in Natchez felt cultural, not biologically, superior to blacks. Though the town has been desegregated, white residents of Natchez still look back fondly on the antebellum era. Gavin J. Campbell, contributor to the H-Net website, commented: “Throughout the book, Davis paints a sensitive portrait of white and black Natchez in the troublesome years since the Depression. His personal engagement with the city and its people make for compelling reading, particularly in those sections at the start of each chapter where he relates his encounters with local residents during the course of his work. Yet despite his earnest desire to represent white racial attitudes fairly, he does not allow white southerners the easy sentimentality and intellectual dishonesty that have comforted them through civil war and civil rights.”
Davis profiles an important figure in Florida’s history in An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. Douglas was a powerful advocate for the preservation of the Florida Everglades. Her book, The Everglades: River of Grass, proved to be influential in galvanizing support for her environmental movement. Writing on the Tampa Bay Times website, Jeff Klinkenberg commented: “Davis never met Douglas, but he has given her the serious biography she deserves, capturing her cantankerous personality and brilliant mind, while at the same time providing the historical context necessary to fully appreciate her amazing life. It’s a tour de force.” “This outstanding volume is essential for environmental and history collections,” asserted Patricia Ann Owens in Library Journal.
The Gulf
In The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Davis traces the history of the Gulf of Mexico from prehistoric times through the present. He highlights the arrival of the Spanish to the region during the 1500s and discusses migration to the region in the centuries that followed. Davis devotes much of the book to changes in the geography of the Gulf and the marine life found there. He notes that building development and the oil and gas industry have caused irreparable damage to geographical features in the region. Davis also profiles important people in the Gulf’s history. In an interview with Susan Larson, contributor to the New Orleans Advocate website, Davis stated: “I want this book to encourage Americans to connect with the Gulf in a mutually wholesome way by reminding them that we have this marvelous sea in our backyard that is more than an oil sump and a sunny beach. … It’s a sea that has shaped our history, enriched our lives, and freely given to us. Indeed, we’ve taken much from it, and that’s OK, but to continue doing so we have to give something back.”
Ron Cunningham, reviewer on the Gainesville Sun website, remarked: “The Gulf is an incisive, comprehensive and entertaining portrait of one of the world’s most diverse and productive marine ecosystems.” Cunningham added: “Amid all of the pollution, exploitation and corrosion this could easily have been a grim history of ‘Paradise Lost.’ But in Davis’ skilled hands it is as much love story as tragedy.” “Detailed and exhaustive, written in lucid, impeccable prose, The Gulf is a fine work of information and insight, destined to be admired and cited,” asserted William J. Cobb on the Dallas Morning News website. Writing on the New York Times website, Philip Connors suggested: “Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea, a lyrical paean to its remaining estuaries and marshes, and a marvelous mash-up of human and environmental history. He has also given us the story of how a once gorgeous place was made safe for the depredations of the petrochemical age.” Colette Bancroft, contributor to the Tampa Bay Times website, commented: “Davis is a historian, and this book is packed with research, but The Gulf does not read like a textbook. He is a graceful, clear, often lyrical writer who makes sometimes surprising, always illuminating connections—it’s not a stretch to compare him to John McPhee.” “This is a work of astonishing breadth: richly peopled, finely structured, beautifully written,” wrote Robert Eagan in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly reviewer described it as a “comprehensive and thoroughly researched narrative.” Gilbert Taylor, critic in Booklist, stated: “Marked by thorough knowledge and fluid writing, this work will enhance any collection of American and environmental history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2017, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, p. 27.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of The Gulf.
Library Journal, January 1, 2009, Patricia Ann Owens, review of An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, p. 118; January 1, 2017, Robert Eagan, review of The Gulf, p. 121.
Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2017, review of The Gulf, p. 73.
ONLINE
Dallas Morning News Online, https://www.dallasnews.com/ (March 22, 2017), William J. Cobb, review of The Gulf.
Gainesville Sun Online, http://www.gainesville.com (March 22, 2017), Ron Cunningham, review of The Gulf; (March 22, 2017), Ron Cunningham, author interview.
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org/ (June 1, 2002), Gavin J. Campbell, review of Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930.
Miami Herald Online, http://www.miamiherald.com/ (March 19, 2017), Colette Bancroft, review of The Gulf.
New Orleans Advocate Online, http://www.theadvocate.com/ (March 20, 2017), Susan Larson, author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 26, 2017), Philip Connors, review of The Gulf.
Tampa Bay Times Online, http://www.tampabay.com/ (April 25, 2009), Jeff Klinkenberg, review of An Everglades Providence; (March 2, 2017), Colette Bancroft, review of The Gulf.
University of Florida, College of Liberal Arts and Science Website, http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ (October 18, 2017), author faculty profile.
University of Florida, Department of History Website, http://history.ufl.edu/ (October 18, 2017), author faculty profile.
WUFT Florida’s 89.1 Online, https://www.wuft.org/ (January 1, 2017), Shelby Oesterreicher, author interview.*
Jack E. Davis
235 Keene-Flint Hall
(352) 273-3398
Fax: (352) 392-6927
davisjac@ufl.edu
www.clas.ufl.edu/users/davisjac/
Mailing address:
Department of History
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
Professor Jack E. Davis received his Ph.D. in 1994 at Brandeis University. He works with students whose interests lie in environmental history. Before joining the University of Florida faculty, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (where he was director of environmental studies), the University of Jordan (where he was a Fulbright scholar), and Eckerd College. In 2004, he launched the department’s student journal, Alpata: A Journal of History, and remains its faculty advisor. His Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize for the best book in southern history published in 2001. His latest book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009), received the gold medal in the nonfiction category of the Florida Book Awards. In addition to examining Douglas’s eighty-year relationship with the Everglades, the book explores nature as historical agent, the feminization of nature protection, and the evolution of the science of ecology and its influence in environmental awareness. He has edited three anthologies (on the civil rights movement, female activism in Florida, and Florida environmental history) and a collection of writings by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. His current book project, Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, is a sweeping history from geological formation to the present of how the Gulf of Mexico converged with human life around it.
Jack E. Davis
Curriculum Vitæ (brief)
Areas of Specialization:
U.S. Environmental History, Modern U.S., U.S. South, Florida History, Sustainability Studies.
Education:
1994 Ph.D. American History. Brandeis University.
Academic Employment:
Professor of History, University of Florida, August 2010-.
Affiliated faculty, School of Natural Resources and the Environment, 2003-.
Associate Professor of History, University of Florida, Gainesville: August 2003-2010.
Fulbright Associate Professor, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, 2002-2003.
Associate Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL: 2001-2003.
Assistant Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies, University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL: 1997-2001.
Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of History and American Studies, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL: June 1994-May 1997.
Books:
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2017).
An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (Environmental History and the American South Series: University of Georgia Press, 2009, paperback 2011). (Florida Book Awards Gold Medal winner)
Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez since 1930 (Louisiana State University Press, 2001, paperback 2004). (Charles S. Sydnor Award winner)
Co-editor, with Raymond Arsenault, Paradise Lost? The History of Florida Environmental (University Press of Florida, 2005) author of introduction and two essays.
Co-editor, with Kari Frederickson, Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida (University Press of Florida, 2003) sole author of introduction and one essay.
Editor, The Wide Brim: Early Poems and Ponderings of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (University Press of Florida, 2002).
Editor, The Civil Rights Movement (Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
Peer-reviewed Book Chapters and Articles (selected):
“Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extra-Human Historical Agency,” The New History of Florida, Michael Gannon ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013).
“Sharp Prose for Green: John D. MacDonald and the First Ecological Novel,” Florida Historical Quarterly 87 (Spring 2009): 484-508.
“'Conservation is Now a Dead Word': Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Transformation of American Environmentalism,” Environmental History 8 (January 2003): 53-76.
“New Left, Revisionist, In-Your-Face History: Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July Experience,” Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy, Robert Brent Toplin ed. (University Press of Kansas, 2000), 135-48.
“Green Awakening: Social Activism and the Evolution of Marjory Stoneman Douglas's Environmental Consciousness,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 80 (October 2001): 43-77.
“The Struggle for Public History: Black and White Claims to Natchez's Past,” The Public Historian 22 (Winter 2000): 45-63.
“Baseball's Reluctant Challenge: Desegregating Major League Spring Training Sites, 1960-1963,” The Journal of Sport History 20 (Fall 1992): 144-62.
Honors, Grants, and Awards (selected):
MacDowell Colony residential fellowship, May 2014.
Florida Book Award Honoree, Florida’s Eden, Gainesville, FL, April 22, 2013.
Seaside Institute writer-in-residence fellowship, January 2013.
Charlie Award (1st place), Florida Magazine Association, best feature writing for "An Ancient Power Central to Our Lives: The History and Mystery of the Gulf of Mexico," Forum 35 (February/March 2011).
Charlie Award (1st place), Florida Magazine Association, best in-depth reporting for "An Ancient Power Central to Our Lives: The History and Mystery of the Gulf of Mexico," Forum 35 (February/March 2011).
Faculty Enhancement Opportunity Grant, fall 2011.
Florida Book Awards (Florida Division of Cultural Affairs), Gold Medal winner, best non-fiction book of 2009.
Waldo W. Neikirk Term Professor, 2009-2010.
Southern Association of American Letters, honored scholar 2006.
J. William Fulbright Scholar Award, 2002-2003 (University of Jordan).
Charles S. Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association, distinguished book in southern history published in 2001, for Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930.
Jack Davis
Home / Arts and Entertainment / Jack Davis: “Sometimes Breaking The Rules Is A Good Thing.”
Jack Davis: “Sometimes Breaking The Rules Is A Good Thing.”
By Shelby Oesterreicher
January 1, 2017 Arts and Entertainment, Environment
3
Jack E. Davis is the author of several books including An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century and his new book The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, due out in March from W.W. Norton’s Liveright. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, Davis grew up along the Gulf coast, and divides his time between Gainesville and New Hampshire.
Davis was interviewed by Shelby Oesterreicher, a University of Florida graduate student specializing in communications and leadership in the Department of Agricultural Education.
Jack E. Davis works at the intersection of history, the environment and literature. As an environmental historian at the University of Florida, he pays as much attention to the history of the land, sea and water as to the humans shaped by them.
Davis was drawn to environmental history during his PhD program at Brandeis, though his dissertation and first book involved race relations. He began teaching environmental history his first semester as a professor at Eckerd College 22 years ago, and has taught the course ever since. He also teaches Florida history, civil rights history, sport history – and in spring semester, the History of Water (AMH/EUH 3931-165F for students who are interested).
gulfcoverjackdavis
Davis is the biographer of one of Florida’s foremost environmental writers, the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas, best known for her activism on behalf of the Everglades. His book An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century won the gold medal for best nonfiction in the Florida Book Awards. “The biography is really a dual biography,” Davis said. “It is a biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, but also a biography of place.”
Place is a theme in all of Davis’s writing. He said every good story is accompanied by a good sense of place. Some of the best place-based writing he recommends is Edward Abbey, particularly his book Desert Solitaire.
Davis encourages new writers to read everything they can and make lists of words and phrases that stand out “as uncommonly expressive or eloquent.” For example, reading a piece by Gainesville’s Lauren Groff in the New Yorker, he noted the words “gobsmacked” and “gamboling,” and thought of lines where he could use them in his own work.
Like Douglas and Abby, Davis finds his own inspiration in nature. “I’ve always had a desk in front of a window, so I can look out,” Davis said. “Now some people want to look at a wall because (the outdoors) is a distraction, but I want to be part of it. The aliveness of the outdoors is a place where I like to be, and obviously a quiet place is where I like to write.”
He believes that nature has a personality, and that being observant about each piece of it is crucial to strong writing. His other advice for young writers is to “know the rules, understand your relationship with the rules and then bend them.”
“Sometimes breaking the rules is a good thing,” he said. “Surrender yourself to the writing and trust it.”
Davis lived for part of his childhood on Santa Rosa Sound on the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was an “inspiring force,” he said, helping lead him to his latest book project, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. He said he had always wanted to write a book about the history of the Gulf, but organizing the information was intimidating.
Davis argues that the BP oil spill hijacked the identity of the Gulf of Mexico, so that people think the spill is the worst environmental disaster the Gulf suffered. Yet “every day is an environmental tragedy” that exceeds the spill, he said.
The Gulf book is not all gloom, however; it is full of stories from indigenous coast-dwellers to artists such as Winslow Homer and Walter Inglis Anderson. Davis said he hopes it will help give readers a better understanding of the Gulf and its history – both human and natural. He also wants readers to enjoy the book, and get a good sense of what the Gulf of Mexico was like before humanity’s footprint.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Edward Abbey’s name.
Jack Davis’ new book shares his affinity for ‘The Gulf’
MOST POPULAR
13
Spencer contract to speak at UF complete
Oct 5 at 8:58 PM
14
Crafty YouTube star
Oct 5 at 11:25 AM
15
Petty’s career illustrated drive to succeed
Oct 3 at 6:06 PM
16
Gators lose Del Rio, but team up for SEC win
Sep 30 at 6:41 PM
1
Gainesville: Where Tom Petty’s dreams began
Oct 4 at 10:14 AM
2
Levee breached
Oct 3 at 10:53 AM
3
Gainesville native and rock legend Tom Petty dies at 66
Oct 3 at 10:54 AM
4
Storm Alert: Another hurricane could be headed for Florida
Oct 4 at 5:47 PM
5
Petty gets tribute panel on 34th Street mural
Oct 3 at 12:09 PM
6
Ready for crowds
Oct 5 at 6:00 PM
7
Unruly patient forces landing of ShandsCair helicopter
Oct 5 at 11:14 AM
8
UF resident dramatizes surgery for hit TV show
Oct 1 at 10:46 PM
9
Syphilis rate nearly doubles in Alachua County
Oct 1 at 7:23 AM
10
Honoring a legend
Oct 4 at 11:26 AM
11
‘I’m going to die’: High-rise gunman kills 59 in Las Vegas
Oct 3 at 6:58 AM
12
Two injured as truck crashes into La Tienda restaurant
Oct 4 at 3:58 PM
13
Spencer contract to speak at UF complete
Oct 5 at 8:58 PM
14
Crafty YouTube star
Oct 5 at 11:25 AM
15
Petty’s career illustrated drive to succeed
Oct 3 at 6:06 PM
16
Gators lose Del Rio, but team up for SEC win
Sep 30 at 6:41 PM
1
Gainesville: Where Tom Petty’s dreams began
Oct 4 at 10:14 AM
2
Levee breached
Oct 3 at 10:53 AM
3
Gainesville native and rock legend Tom Petty dies at 66
Oct 3 at 10:54 AM
4
Storm Alert: Another hurricane could be headed for Florida
Oct 4 at 5:47 PM
1
2
3
4
OUR PICKS
Previous
Enter Now!
Enter NOW!
The latest on your teams
Take the Quiz
Check out Time & Money
Boomers and Seniors Expo
Enter Now!
Enter NOW!
Next
HIDE CAPTION
Jack E. Davis
By Ron Cunningham / Correspondent
Posted Mar 22, 2017 at 10:10 AM
Updated Mar 22, 2017 at 10:15 AM
Jack Davis grew up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. First in Ft. Walton Beach, and later in Tampa Bay’s Pinellas County. As a child, in the 1960s, he spent many happy hours in a small boat exploring the waters of Ft. Walton Sound.
“The sound was my cul de sac,” he said. “The boat was my bicycle.”
Not surprisingly, writing his newest book “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” was a “labor of love” for the professor of history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida. Inspired by his own childhood memories of special places that, in some instances, no longer exist, Davis wanted to share his deep affinity for Gulf winds, water and shifting sands with readers who may not know very much about “America’s sea.”
“I want to encourage Americans to connect with the Gulf in a mutually wholesome way by reminding them that they have this marvelous sea in their backyard that is more than an oil sump and a sunny beach,” Davis says. It’s a sea that has shaped our history, enriched our lives, and freely given to us.
“Indeed, we’ve taken much from it,” he adds. “But to continue doing so we have to give something back, and it’s not a lot, just our respect for what makes the Gulf a giving sea — its estuaries, rivers, natural coastline, and diversity of life.”
Related content
Book review: 'The Gulf' is an incisive, entertaining portrait of 'America's Sea'
March 22, 2017
Fellow Gainesville writer Cynthia Barnett, author of “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History” and other books about water, is a frequent Davis collaborator. Both are early morning writers who often exchange pre-dawn emails commenting on each other’s work. Barnett admires Davis’ new book as much for its style and prose as its subject matter.
“I think Jack is the rare academic who thinks a lot about every word he writes,” she says. “He cares an awful lot about words, about sentences, about cadence, about how things sound and I think that really comes across. He will think about a particular metaphor for a week or more.
In “The Gulf,” Barnett says Davis “is really trying to help us see how profound our loss has been. There is a lot of devastating storytelling in the book. But in the end he is giving us hope with the idea that we can live differently with the coast. That we are at another great turning point. We can live like the Calusa, who thrived in harmony with the Gulf, or the Spanish, who starved in plain sight of its productive estuary beds.”
Published by Liveright Co. “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea” will have its formal launch March 19 at Gainesville’s Matheson History Museum, 513 E. University Ave., from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The public is invited.
QUOTED: "I want this book to encourage Americans to connect with the Gulf in a mutually wholesome way by reminding them that we have this marvelous sea in our backyard that is more than an oil sump and a sunny beach. ... It's a sea that has shaped our history, enriched our lives, and freely given to us. Indeed, we've taken much from it, and that's OK, but to continue doing so we have to give something back."
The Gulf of Mexico: Book is a deep dive into the world's 10th-largest body of water
BY SUSAN LARSON | Special to The Advocate MAR 20, 2017 - 2:00 PM (0)
Jack Davis (c) Ed White_300dpi.jpg
Jack E. Davis
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO COPYRIGHT ED WHITE
Gulf_978-0-87140-866-2.jpg
Buy Now
“The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea” by Jack E. Davis
Wisner002.jpg
Buy Now
Beaches, oil rigs, pelicans and seemingly endless water are seen from the Wisner Foundation land in Port Fourchon on the Gulf of Mexico.
Matthew Hinton
Think about the Gulf of Mexico for a minute.
Maybe what comes to mind is a friend who works on an oil rig, a fishing trip, a beach vacation, or a big storm.
No matter what your idea of the world’s 10th largest body of water, Jack E. Davis’s splendid new book, “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea,” will deepen your knowledge of and respect for its importance.
Davis is a professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, and his book is both broad and deep, taking us back to the first settlements on the Gulf, then to a moment in 1543 when Spaniards saw oil on the Texas shore and used it to seal their boats, the flora and fauna, the development of commercial and recreational fishing and tourism, the history of hurricanes, the devastation of the BP oil spill and the need for conservation.
Davis has done his homework in Louisiana.
“I tell my students that research is both an intellectual pursuit and a tactile one,” he said. “I emphasize the importance of physically interacting with a place … Just being there was invaluable. Feeling the air and taking in the light, observing big things (washed-out roads, the built environment on stilts) and little things (like all those damn white pickup trucks I mention in the epilogue — some 70 percent of the pickups we counted were white; can you explain that?) helps me become better attuned to what I'm writing about.
“I want my readers to be transported by a place just as I have been,” Davis continued. “What surprised me (besides the white pickups) — mesmerized me — was the scale and infinite beauty of the watery landscape and how people integrate their lives into it, have adapted to it, and continue to adapt as it changes, and stay with it.
"It's heartening to see these powerful connections, but sad to see forces that may eventually sever them.”
Some great Louisiana characters appear in this book — Edward McIlhenny for one. “This guy knew a lot and he knew how to revive the egret population after it had been shot out for the women’s hat industry. This horrified Edward McIlhenny, and he wanted to do something about it, and he did. He set the standard for others in establishing bird sanctuaries.”
Meteorologist Nash Roberts plays a part. “Is there a better name for a weather forecaster?” Davis said. “It was perfect for who he was. Here was another person I knew nothing about until I started searching hurricanes Gulf wide — look at how accurate he was, out-forecasting everybody. And he was just doing his job because he cared about people. I loved knowing that people would ask ‘What does Nash say?’ ”
SPONSORED CONTENT ON THE ADVOCATE
How to Integrate Your Pharmacy Benefits With Your Medical Plan
BY REGENCE - Prescription drug costs are soaring, but they don’t have...
Davis draws on many storms in this history. “I did not want Katrina to be the hurricane of the Gulf any more than I wanted the spill to take over it,” Davis said. “Others have written extensively and often eloquently about Katrina and I didn't want to rehash what their work already says. I wanted to focus on the back story to Katrina with an epic hurricane, and here was another, Audrey, a hurricane that few remember, outside Louisianans, that I thought was a good, including dramatic, starting point for the back story, which is about amnesia following hurricanes.
“And after I began writing the chapter, Nash Roberts presented himself to me, and I saw him as an ideal subject to carry the narrative. He brought it all together for me when he gave the talk on the Mississippi coast, amidst the fleet of floating casinos, and questioned the population advance on hurricane country despite all the trauma the coast had suffered just in his lifetime.”
Davis has also drawn from his own experiences, growing up on Santa Rosa Sound, then living in Mississippi and now in Tampa.
As a teacher, he’s a writer with a mission.
“I want this book to encourage Americans to connect with the Gulf in a mutually wholesome way by reminding them that we have this marvelous sea in our backyard that is more than an oil sump and a sunny beach,” Davis said. “It's a sea that has shaped our history, enriched our lives, and freely given to us. Indeed, we've taken much from it, and that's OK, but to continue doing so we have to give something back, and it's not a lot, just our respect for what makes the Gulf a living and a giving sea — its estuaries, rivers, natural coastline and diversity of life, including us.”
QUOTED: "Marked by thorough knowledge and fluid writing, this work will enhance any collection of American and environmental history."
10/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507343345444 1/5
Print Marked Items
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Gilbert Taylor
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.
By Jack E. Davis.
Mar. 2017.448p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $28.95 (9780871408662). 916.3.
A perceptive historical survey of America's Gulf Coast, this fascinating work accents the region's nexus between nature
and civilization. Chronologically, Davis' account extends from Spanish discoveries of the early 1500s to the present, but
organizationally he centers his inquiries on geographical features and seminal episodes of economic activity. Estuaries,
he emphasizes, are the most important aspect of the coastline from Florida to Texas. Their abundant marine life, attested
to by shell mounds left by ancient native peoples and commercial and sport fishing, as well as real-estate development
and oil and gas extraction earn Davis' discerning attention. A close second in topographical significance is the barrier
islands' natural role as protectors of estuaries, while their imposed roles as bombing ranges or high-rise-building sites
exemplify the tension between environmental preservation and industrial and construction activity. This constitutes
Davis' overarching theme, which also applies to the Gulf's third major piece of geography, the Mississippi River delta.
Amid these land--and seascapes Davis populates colorful characters, from would-be conquistadors to business and
tourism entrepreneurs to environmental activists, who form a gallery of human interest that easily carries the reader
from cover to cover. Marked by thorough knowledge and fluid writing, this work will enhance any collection of
American and environmental history.--Gilbert Taylor
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taylor, Gilbert. "The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 27. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689441&it=r&asid=7e43c20474a1642de6801d0b6126c995.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689441
10/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507343345444 2/5
Davis, Jack E.: THE GULF
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davis, Jack E. THE GULF Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 3, 14 ISBN: 978-0-87140-866-2
A sweeping environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico that duly considers the ravages of nature and man.In light of
the 2010 devastation of the BP oil spill, environmental historian Davis (History and Sustainability Studies/Univ. of
Florida; An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, 2009, etc.)
presents an engaging, truly relevant new study of the Gulf as a powerful agent in the American story, one that has
become "lost in the pages of American history." Once the habitat of the highly developed, self-sustaining Calusa
indigenous people, the rich estuary of the Gulf is the 10th largest body of water in the world, and it forms the sheltered
basin that creates the warm, powerful Gulf Stream, which allowed the first explorers, such as Ponce de Leon, to make
their ways back to the Old World. Davis meanders through the early history of this fascinating sea, which became a
kind of graveyard to many early marooned explorers due to shipwrecks and run-ins with natives. Yet the conquistadors
took little note of the abundant marine life inhabiting the waters and, unaccountably, starved. A more familiar economy
was established at the delta of the muddy, sediment-rich Mississippi River, discovered by the French. The author
focuses on the 19th century as the era when the Gulf finally asserted its place in the great move toward Manifest
Destiny; it would "significantly enlarge the water communication of national commerce and shift the boundary of the
country from vulnerable land to protective sea." The Gulf states would also become a mecca of tourism and fishing and,
with the discovery of oil, enter a dire period of the "commercialization of national endowments." The story of this
magnificent body of water and its wildlife grows tragic at this point--e.g., the "killing juggernaut" of Gulf wading birds
to obtain fashionable feathers. Still, it remains an improbable, valiant survival tale in the face of the BP oil spill and
ongoing climate change. An elegant narrative braced by a fierce, sobering environmental conviction.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Davis, Jack E.: THE GULF." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234416&it=r&asid=6595fa7cfe6619c8dcd38fcc304c5d8e.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234416
QUOTED: "comprehensive and thoroughly researched narrative."
10/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507343345444 3/5
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Publishers Weekly.
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p73.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Jack E. Davis. Liveright, $29.95 (608p) ISBN 978-0-87140-866-2
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this comprehensive and thoroughly researched narrative, Davis, professor of history and sustainability at the
University of Florida, positions the Gulf of Mexico as an integral part of American ecology, culture, and--with future
good stewardship--economic success. He sprinkles geological and marine history throughout the chronicle of the coast's
demographic changes from indigenous inhabitants to European colonizers, Louisiana Cajuns, Texas roughnecks, and
Florida's tourists. Davis unflinchingly addresses the decades of oil spills, overfishing, and poor environmental practices
that reduced resources. He also describes the decline of coastal marshes, which protect against hurricanes, and the
erosion stemming from ill-conceived Army Corps of Engineer projects. Hurricanes Camille and Katrina and the
catastrophic BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill poignantly receive their due. Davis also discusses inspired conservation
efforts to combat the fashion industry's feather fascination and subsequent decimation of snowy egrets. The density of
the fact-packed chapters calls for a deliberate reading pace so as not to overlook any of Davis's thought-provoking
commentary and keen descriptions. Rather than advocate an impractical hands-off approach to dealing with the Gulf's
myriad issues, Davis makes the convincing argument that wiser, far-sighted practices--including those aimed at
combating climate change--could help the Gulf region to remain a bastion of resources for the foreseeable future. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 73+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714225&it=r&asid=d201aa17b66609ebb27b65b41f75bd10.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714225
QUOTED: "This is a work of astonishing breadth: richly peopled, finely structured, beautifully written."
10/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507343345444 4/5
Davis, Jack E.: The Gulf: The Making of an
American Sea
Robert Eagan
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p121.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Davis. Jack E. The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Liveright: Norton. Mar. 2017.448p. photos, index. ISBN
9780871408662. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780871408679. SCI
"If Jefferson's West was the land of the nation's manifest destiny, the Gulf was its sea." So argues Davis (history, Univ.
of Florida; An Everglades Providence) in this magnificent chronicle of the Gulf of Mexico. Spanning a period from the
gulf s geological formation to the present, this book is organized around the "natural characteristics of the Gulf" (i.e., its
fauna, flora, weather, and landscape). The stories of the Europeans--the Spanish, who found the gulf; the French, who
discovered its connection to the Mississippi; and the British, who began to map it--will be familiar to many readers, but
Davis's retelling still sticks. The core of the title, though, concerns "America's Gulf" in the 19th century onward: when
the Coastal Survey finished charting the coast; when the area's first real industry, commercial fishing, flourished; when
sport fishing and beach tourism became popular; and when the petroleum industry took off. Environmental
perturbations followed. And lost, like artifacts in the Florida aboriginal Calusa's shell mounds, was the lesson of
holding a "prudent relationship with nature." VERDICT This is a work of astonishing breadth: richly peopled, finely
structured, beautifully written. It should appeal equally well to Gulf coast residents and snowbirds, students of
environmental history, and general readers.--Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Eagan, Robert. "Davis, Jack E.: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 121.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562437&it=r&asid=0edf7779ea3d64ee7e53cc08898c9b4c.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562437
QUOTED: "This outstanding volume is essential for environmental and history collections."
10/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507343345444 5/5
Davis, Jack E.: An Everglades Providence:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American
Environmental Century
Patricia Ann Owens
Library Journal.
134.1 (Jan. 1, 2009): p118.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Davis, Jack E. An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century.
Univ. of Georgia. (Environmental History & the American South). Feb. 2009. c.731p, photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-
8203-3071-6. $34.95. SCI
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Davis (history, Univ. of Florida; The Wide Brim: Early Poems and Ponderings of Marjory Stoneman Douglas) describes
this comprehensive study as a dual biography: it is both a portrait of one of the 20th century's most important
environmental figures and a history of Florida's Everglades. The long-lived Douglas (1890-1998) is best known for the
classic The Everglades: River of Grass and her tireless efforts to preserve that region. But she was also a lifelong
feminist and social activist who worked to advance human rights. As an author, Douglas used experiences from her own
life and tales of people she met in Florida to write stories for popular magazines and bulk upon her scholarly training at
Wellesley to produce history and biography. In addition to the rich detail and documentation of Douglas's life, Davis
offers an impressive look at America during Douglas's lifetime and the growth of America's environmental movement.
This outstanding volume is essential for environmental and history collections.--Patricia Ann Owens, Wabash Valley
Coll., Mount Carmel, IL
Owens, Patricia Ann
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Owens, Patricia Ann. "Davis, Jack E.: An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American
Environmental Century." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2009, p. 118+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA192801311&it=r&asid=b0bd878377e4ec3f73a1fb158e71a2e4.
Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A192801311
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Jack E. Davis. Liveright. 608 pages. $29.95.
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Jack E. Davis. Liveright. 608 pages. $29.95.
BOOKS
Got a question about the Gulf? Here’s your answer
BY COLETTE BANCROFT
LINKEDIN
GOOGLE+
PINTEREST
REDDIT
PRINT
ORDER REPRINT OF THIS STORY
MARCH 19, 2017 11:07 AM
Most of us who live around the Gulf of Mexico take it for granted.
If we ask questions about it, they’re quotidian: Are the fish biting? Is the water warm enough to take the kids swimming? Do I smell another Red Tide?
Occasionally, they’re life or death: Will that hurricane come my way?
ADVERTISING
Jack E. Davis, it seems, had as many questions about the gulf as there are sand grains on a beach (mostly quartz, washed down over millions of years from faraway mountaintops, plus finely ground shell) or feathers on a snowy egret (one of many bird species nearly wiped out by the plume hunters of a century ago, now happily recovered). He has answered a tide of those questions in his splendid new book, “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.”
Davis is a professor of history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida. His 2009 book, “An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century,” received the gold medal in the nonfiction category of the Florida Book Awards.
The Gulf takes on a larger subject with a sweeping history from the sea’s formation to its state in the 21st century.
Davis explains his approach in the prologue with a description of a 1904 work made by the great American painter Winslow Homer during one of his frequent sojourns to Homosassa, just up the coast from Tampa Bay: “In one such painting, Shell Heap, sabal palms shade an aboriginal mound spilling discarded oyster shells down to the water’s edge where two anglers float in a skiff, suggesting a continuity between the ancient and the recent. Like all of Homer’s Homosassa paintings, Shell Heap conveys an intimate and vital connection linking humankind, nature, and history. I call this triad Homer’s truth, and it lies at the heart of this book.”
Davis begins with the gulf’s origin — not a meteor impact, as was once thought, but something much slower. It began to form 150 million years ago, “midwifed by the breakup of what was then Earth’s sole landmass, Pangaea, surrounded by a single global ocean, Panthalassa.” That origin, he notes, was confirmed by geologists using core drillings made by petroleum hunters in the 20th century.
Gulf waters rose and fell over eons, sometimes sinking 250 feet lower than they are now, sometimes rising until they reached up to modern Illinois. As it settled into its modern form, the 10th-largest body of water on the planet, the gulf’s depths and shores became home to a rich assortment of plants and animals, and eventually human inhabitants.
Davis writes about several of the indigenous cultures that flourished around the gulf for thousands of years, notably the Calusa. He describes the discovery of artifacts by a worker digging peat on Marco Island in 1895, artifacts that excited the attention of legendary archaeologist Frank Hamilton Cushing and led to modern understanding of that ancient culture. The Calusa built cities and towns atop shell mounds they constructed all over southwest Florida, dug miles of canals and artificial lakes, and traveled around the gulf by canoe.
Davis covers shifting European control of the gulf coast: Spanish, English, French. The Spanish first seized control of the Panhandle but abandoned it for more than a century after a hurricane flattened their settlements in Pensacola. When the Revolutionary War began, England actually had 15 colonies. East Florida and West Florida get left out of our national origin narrative because they remained loyal to the crown.
The bulk of the book focuses on the gulf coasts of five U.S. states from the 18th to 21st centuries, and Davis brings that history alive by couching it in the stories of individual people. When he writes about the importance of sport fishing, especially for tarpon, as the gulf coast changed in the 20th century, he frames it with the story of novelist Randy Wayne White, a Sanibel resident and former fishing guide who has been involved in changing rules about how the “silver king” of the gulf is fished. Railroad magnate Henry Plant, inventor Thomas Edison and (of course) Ernest Hemingway are part of the tarpon story, too.
Davis’ chapter about Mississippi artist Walter Anderson and his long, intimate relationship with a place called Horn Island is an enthralling miniature biography about a fascinating man, and about the heartbreaking fates of man and island. That chapter also wraps in gulf pirate lore (much of it phony) and the short military history of Fort De Soto.
The history of the gulf is also a history of harmful human impact, whether motivated by profit, like the oil industry’s destruction of the Louisiana coast, or simply unintended consequences, like the countless dams, seawalls, jetties and levees that hasten erosion rather than prevent it, or the waterfront subdivisions on dredged-up land cut by finger canals with such poor water circulation they turn into silted-up trash chutes.
Davis takes apart the history of fertilizer use, for everything from Florida lawns and golf courses to Midwestern cornfields, and explains how fertilizer runoff is among the biggest threats to life in the gulf and the economies of states around it.
Davis recounts stories with happy outcomes as well, like the return of so many of the bird species almost erased by plume hunters, action to protect the coast’s essential mangrove hem and the return to health of Tampa Bay, which four decades ago had been rendered nearly biologically dead by pollution but has been restored by concerted political and volunteer action.
There’s more, so much more. Davis is a historian, and this book is packed with research, but “The Gulf” does not read like a textbook. He is a graceful, clear, often lyrical writer who makes sometimes surprising, always illuminating connections — it’s not a stretch to compare him to John McPhee.
And he is telling an important story, especially for those of us who live around what he calls the American Sea. What happens to it happens to us, and the more we know, the better equipped we’ll be to deal with a future on its shores.
Colette Bancroft reviewed this book for the Tampa Bay Times.
QUOTED: "Davis is a historian, and this book is packed with research, but The Gulf does not read like a textbook. He is a graceful, clear, often lyrical writer who makes sometimes surprising, always illuminating connections—it's not a stretch to compare him to John McPhee."
Review: Jack E. Davis' 'The Gulf' is an enthralling history of the Gulf of Mexico
Colette BancroftColette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Thursday, March 2, 2017 5:00am
259
259
Print 0
Previous
Next
University of Florida professor Jack E. Davis is the author of “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea.”
Previous
Next
Previous
Next
University of Florida professor Jack E. Davis is the author of “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea.”
Previous
Next
Most of us who live around the Gulf of Mexico take it for granted.
RELATED NEWS/ARCHIVE
Events: Jack Davis to discuss, sign 'The Gulf' at Oxford Exchange
7 Months Ago
Events: Jack Davis, Lee Irby to speak at USF St. Petersburg
6 Months Ago
Photo of the Day for September 21, 2017 - A Gorgeous sunset on the gulf
2 Weeks Ago
If we ask questions about it, they're quotidian: Are the fish biting? Is the water warm enough to take the kids swimming? Do I smell another Red Tide?
Occasionally, they're life or death: Will that hurricane come my way?
Jack E. Davis, it seems, had as many questions about the gulf as there are sand grains on a beach (mostly quartz, washed down over millions of years from faraway mountaintops, plus finely ground shell) or feathers on a snowy egret (one of many bird species nearly wiped out by the plume hunters of a century ago, now happily recovered). He has answered a tide of those questions in his splendid new book, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.
Davis is a professor of history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida. His 2009 book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, received the gold medal in the nonfiction category of the Florida Book Awards.
The Gulf takes on a larger subject with a sweeping history from the sea's formation to its state in the 21st century.
Davis explains his approach in the prologue with a description of a 1904 work made by the great American painter Winslow Homer during one of his frequent sojourns to Homosassa, just up the coast from Tampa Bay: "In one such painting, Shell Heap, sabal palms shade an aboriginal mound spilling discarded oyster shells down to the water's edge where two anglers float in a skiff, suggesting a continuity between the ancient and the recent. Like all of Homer's Homosassa paintings, Shell Heap conveys an intimate and vital connection linking humankind, nature, and history. I call this triad Homer's truth, and it lies at the heart of this book."
Davis begins with the gulf's origin — not a meteor impact, as was once thought, but something much slower. It began to form 150 million years ago, "midwifed by the breakup of what was then Earth's sole landmass, Pangaea, surrounded by a single global ocean, Panthalassa." That origin, he notes, was confirmed by geologists using core drillings made by petroleum hunters in the 20th century.
Gulf waters rose and fell over eons, sometimes sinking 250 feet lower than they are now, sometimes rising until they reached up to modern Illinois. As it settled into its modern form, the 10th-largest body of water on the planet, the gulf's depths and shores became home to a rich assortment of plants and animals, and eventually human inhabitants.
Davis writes about several of the indigenous cultures that flourished around the gulf for thousands of years, notably the Calusa. He describes the discovery of artifacts by a worker digging peat on Marco Island in 1895, artifacts that excited the attention of legendary archaeologist Frank Hamilton Cushing and led to modern understanding of that ancient culture. The Calusa built cities and towns atop shell mounds they constructed all over southwest Florida, dug miles of canals and artificial lakes, and traveled around the gulf by canoe. The gulf provided them with such a rich diet of fish and shellfish that when the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they described the tribe's members as giants, glowing with strength and health. Yet the Spanish saw the region as worthless — they sought only gold, silver and slaves — and many conquistadors starved amid its plenty.
About 20,000 indigenous people lived in the Calusa lands then, about 350,000 around the gulf's shores, most of them near resource-rich estuaries like Tampa Bay. Davis writes, "The Apalachee, Tocobaga and Calusa in Florida, Karankawa in Texas, Mobilian in Alabama, Biloxi in Mississippi, Houma in Louisiana, and all other Gulf aborigines stood up to Spanish swords and missionaries for more than two hundred years. But they could not resist the diseases, and their once-powerful chiefdoms collapsed."
Davis covers shifting European control of the gulf coast: Spanish, English, French. The Spanish first seized control of the Panhandle but abandoned it for more than a century after a hurricane flattened their settlements in Pensacola. When the Revolutionary War began, England actually had 15 colonies. East Florida and West Florida get left out of our national origin narrative because they remained loyal to the crown.
The bulk of the book focuses on the gulf coasts of five U.S. states in the 18th to 21st centuries, and Davis brings that history alive by couching it in the stories of individual people. When he writes about the importance of sport fishing, especially for tarpon, in how the gulf coast changed in the 20th century, he frames it with the story of novelist Randy Wayne White, a Sanibel resident and former fishing guide who has been involved in changing rules about how the "silver king" of the gulf is fished. Railroad magnate Henry Plant, inventor Thomas Edison and (of course) Ernest Hemingway are part of the tarpon story, too.
Chapters about the terrible depredations of plume hunting during the fad for feathered women's hats include such figures as Alfred Lechevelier, a.k.a. the Old Frenchman, who slaughtered millions of birds up and down Florida's west coast; Katherine Tippetts, a wealthy St. Petersburg woman who presided over the city's Audubon Society chapter for 33 years; and Ned McIlhenny, heir to the Tabasco Sauce fortune and a creator of bird sanctuaries.
Davis' chapter about Mississippi artist Walter Anderson and his long, intimate relationship with a place called Horn Island is an enthralling miniature biography about a fascinating man, and about the heartbreaking fates of man and island. That chapter also wraps in gulf pirate lore (much of it phony) and the short military history of Fort De Soto.
The history of the gulf is also a history of harmful human impact, whether motivated by profit, like the oil industry's destruction of the Louisiana coast, or simply unintended consequences, like the countless dams, seawalls, jetties and levees that hasten erosion rather than prevent it, or the waterfront subdivisions on dredged-up land cut by finger canals with such poor water circulation they turn into silted-up trash chutes.
Davis takes apart the history of fertilizer use, for everything from Florida lawns and golf courses to Midwestern cornfields, and explains how fertilizer runoff is among the biggest threats to life in the gulf and the economy of states around it.
Davis recounts stories with happy outcomes as well, like the return of so many of the bird species almost erased by plume hunters, action to protect the coast's essential mangrove hem and the return to health of Tampa Bay, which four decades ago had been rendered nearly biologically dead by pollution but has been restored by concerted political and volunteer action.
There's more, so much more. Davis is a historian, and this book is packed with research, but The Gulf does not read like a textbook. He is a graceful, clear, often lyrical writer who makes sometimes surprising, always illuminating connections — it's not a stretch to compare him to John McPhee.
And he is telling an important story, especially for those of us who live around what he calls the American Sea. What happens to it happens to us, and the more we know, the better equipped we'll be to deal with a future on its shores.
Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
By Jack E. Davis
Liveright, 608 pages, $29.95
Meet the author
Jack E. Davis will discuss and sign his book at 1:30 p.m. March 12 at the Oxford Exchange, 420 W Kennedy Blvd., Tampa.
Review: Jack E. Davis' 'The Gulf' is an enthralling history of the Gulf of Mexico 03/02/17 [Last modified: Sunday, March 5, 2017 12:05pm]
Photo reprints | Article reprints
© 2017 Tampa Bay Times
QUOTED: "Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea, a lyrical paean to its remaining estuaries and marshes, and a marvelous mash-up of human and environmental history. He has also given us the story of how a once gorgeous place was made safe for the depredations of the petrochemical age."
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
The Gulf of Mexico in the Age of Petrochemicals
By PHILIP CONNORSMAY 26, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Credit Wesley Allsbrook
THE GULF
The Making of an American Sea
By Jack E. Davis
Illustrated. 592 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.
For those who live distant from it, the Gulf of Mexico made its most vivid appearance on the national stage for all the wrong reasons: the biggest accidental oil spill ever to occur in offshore waters. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout poured 4.9 million barrels of crude into the gulf, damaged beaches and coastal estuaries, and poisoned marine life up and down the food chain, from algae to dolphins. The burning drill rig and underwater plume of hydrocarbons was a media sensation, an unfolding crisis replete with stunning pictures and a herculean mobilization of humans and technology.
In Jack E. Davis’s sprightly and sweeping new history, “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” the spill is both culmination and footnote to five centuries of restless human energies. The largest gulf and 10th-largest body of water on earth, it began forming 150 million years ago, after the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea. Its depth and breadth have fluctuated over the ensuing eons: Its northern tides once lapped shoreline in present-day Illinois. In its current configuration it touches more than 3,000 miles of mainland coast along five American states and six in Mexico, and supports a commercial fishery worth three-quarters of a billion dollars in landings revenue annually.
In Davis’s hands, the story reads like a watery version of the history of the American West. Both places saw Spanish incursions from the south, mutual incomprehension in the meeting of Europeans and aboriginals, waves of disease that devastated the natives and a relentless quest by the newcomers for the raw materials of empire. There were scoundrels and hucksters, booms and busts, senseless killing in sublime landscapes and a tragic belief in the inexhaustible bounty of nature. A few artists and eccentrics fought to preserve the ecology of the place and sometimes succeeded. Whereas the West was re-engineered to account for a shortage of water, the Gulf of Mexico was re-engineered to account for a surfeit of oil.
Continue reading the main story
Buy
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Jack E. Davis
We earn an affiliate commission with each book purchase, which helps support our journalism at The New York Times.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
America’s southern lip is almost entirely flat where land meets water, with none of the cliffs that here and there greet the Atlantic and Pacific. But it was once ringed with mounds of discarded mollusk shells, middens of the Calusa people whose size and robust health astonished the early Spaniards. Davis quotes the Texas naturalist and writer Roy Bedichek, who said, “There remains the unimpeachable evidence of ancient oyster production along the coast which staggers the imagination.” Centuries after the Calusa’s disappearance, Americans quarried the mounds and crushed the shells for road bed material, pillaging antiquarian monuments for the paved expressways of the petroleum age.
Photo
Credit Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
It was the rumor of gold and silver that caused the first Europeans to probe gulf waters. Many met with shipwreck and starvation, even as a native culture thrived along the coastal estuaries, feasting on that bounteous supply of seafood. Despite their complex communication networks and endlessly renewable source of protein, the natives were destroyed in the blink of an eye. Mostly it was the newcomers’ pathogens that did them in, although some were victims of an attitude that viewed them as “artless and lazy” for not exploiting their material abundance for purposes of commerce.
Charismatic fauna of the human variety abound in the region’s lore, and Davis gives many of them cameos. Ponce de León took a fatal poisoned dart in the thigh during a bad day at the beach. John Muir took ill from malaria and geeked out on the flora while he convalesced. Winslow Homer took a hankering to the light, Rachel Carson took an interest in the ecology, and Ernest Hemingway took trophy fish from the deep.
Although the gulf region harbored no gold, it possessed astonishing riches of bird life. Davis, the author of “An Everglades Providence,” recounts “one of the bloodiest crimes committed against wildlife in modern times,” the slaughter of plumage birds for feathered hats in the 19th century. The killing got so out of hand that the gulf’s population of snowy egrets dipped below the population of the endangered American bison. Five million birds annually fed the hat business, leaving the gulf with a mere 10 percent of its previous number of plume birds by the beginning of the 20th century.
Photo
Catering to the sporty types: Fishing for tarpon in the gulf off Sarasota, Fla. Credit Education Images/UIG, via Getty Images
Likewise, oyster beds were scoured and permanently damaged, and shrimp populations were hit hard by the introduction of innovative seafood-harvesting methods like the seine net. New laws and a dawning environmental consciousness helped curtail the worst abuses of commercial fishing, but in Davis’s reckoning, one practice in particular changed the gulf forever: the pursuit of tarpon. Sport fishing brought waves of tourists to the water, all of whom required hotels, restaurants and waterside pavilions for dancing, drinking and swapping tall tales of grappling with the great silver monsters of the sea. First railroads and later highways conveyed sporty types to and from the gulf. The balmy weather and brilliant coastal beaches added their own charms, and the shabby baubles and ticky-tacky architecture of modern industrial tourism were born.
The 20th century accelerated the changes. On the gulf’s eastern shores, developers dredged and filled marshes and estuaries in order to sell a slice of spoiled paradise to Northern transplants. On the western side, industry took hold with the discovery of oil in 1901 at Spindletop in Texas, and oil soon became a major gulf resource. By the end of the century 181,000 wells had been sunk on- and offshore in Louisiana alone, and more than 70,000 miles of pipeline right of way had been secured to transport oil and gas through the state’s marshes. Denuded of its wetlands and mangrove forests from Texas to Florida, much of the coastline started slumping into the sea.
A place that brought explorers to its shores in search of precious metals is now inundated with toxic metals thanks to rivers carrying industrial wastewater. Barrier islands and coastal marshes threaten to disappear because of global warming. Each year Midwestern farm runoff, awash in nitrogen fertilizer dumped on fields of corn, wheat and other crops, creates a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Because of the dams along its course, the river no longer carries its prodigious load of sediment to the sea — the building material of the Louisiana coast. Future hurricanes promise to swallow more of the unstable edge.
It is a sad story well told — although I should confess I began the book skeptical of being entertained and edified by 592 pages about a body of water that has come to be used like a sump for the wastes of industry. My doubts proved unwarranted. Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea, a lyrical paean to its remaining estuaries and marshes, and a marvelous mash-up of human and environmental history. He has also given us the story of how a once gorgeous place was made safe for the depredations of the petrochemical age. How it was made safe from petrochemicals is a book I look forward to reading.
Philip Connors is the author of two books of nonfiction, “Fire Season” and “All the Wrong Places.”
A version of this review appears in print on May 28, 2017, on Page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Crude Awakening. Today's Paper|Subscribe
QUOTED: "Detailed and exhaustive, written in lucid, impeccable prose, The Gulf is a fine work of information and insight, destined to be admired and cited."
'The Gulf' captures the glory, history and tragedy of the 'American sea' on Texas' shores
FILED UNDERBOOKS AT MAR 22 SHARE
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
EMAIL
Print This Story
Written by
Profile image for William J. Cobb
William J. Cobb, Special Contributor
Connect with William J. Cobb Email
Don't miss a story. Like us on Facebook.
LIKE DALLAS NEWS' FACEBOOK PAGE
In the tradition of Jared Diamond's best-seller Collapse (2004) and Simon Winchester's Atlantic (2010) comes Jack E. Davis' nonfiction epic, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, which strives both to celebrate and defend its subject — the Gulf of Mexico. Its Texas coastline is featured prominently in these pages. Detailed and exhaustive, written in lucid, impeccable prose, The Gulf is a fine work of information and insight, destined to be admired and cited.
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis(Liveright)
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis (Liveright)
It begins with a sweeping history of the early inhabitants, from paleo-Indians dating from the end of the Ice Age up to the arrival of Europeans. Davis then naturally shifts his focus to developments after the discovery of the "New World," particularly the early expeditions of Hernando de Soto and the exploits of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca.
According to both historic accounts and archaeological studies, Florida's Calusa culture thrived on the bounties of the sea coast, which supported a healthy, successful and vigorous population —one that collapsed in part from the introduction of European diseases, and the steady influx of first the Spanish and then the English.
ADVERTISING
inRead invented by Teads
Along the Texas coast the Karankawa — a tribe made famous by both saving and capturing Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 — were in a similar position. That they were essentially driven to extinction echoes a familiar lament in the book: Exploitation was deadly for humans and animals alike. Davis' description of the 19th century plume industry, which devastated bird populations, mainly snowy egrets but other species as well, for fashion adornments, is particularly shocking and instructive.
A pod of bottlenose dolphins swims under the oily water of Chandeleur Sound, La., in 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. (
(DMN file/AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
)
A pod of bottlenose dolphins swims under the oily water of Chandeleur Sound, La., in 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. ((DMN file/AP Photo/Alex Brandon))
In the prologue Davis argues his goal is not to be a doomsayer: "The Gulf and its history — its biography, [French scholar Fernand] Braudel might say — should be celebrated, not mourned." Yet there is much to lament: Chapters 10 and 11 focus on the Gulf oil industry, primarily Texas and Louisiana, and its legacy of financial success and environmental catastrophe, from the Spindletop oil gusher of 1901 on: "Since the Deepwater Horizon tragedy of 2010, oil has hijacked the Gulf's identity. It frames how we — from journalists to policy makers, even scientists and tourists — perceive the American sea."
Jack E. Davis (
Lynn Weir
)
Jack E. Davis (
Lynn Weir
)
Development has brought beautiful hotels and tourist accommodations from Miami to South Padre Island, ruining wetlands and wiping out crucial wildlife habitat. We've overfished the waters, wiped out bird populations, and filled the soil and water with toxins. "The bottom line is that the Gulf has become less and less a fishers' sea than an industry's sea."
At times The Gulf suffers from the same flaw of several other excellent volumes of nonfiction, including Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (2009), and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (2014): Davis looks at the Gulf from seemingly all relevant angles: fisheries, oil production, tourism, history, ecological history, pollution, development and much more. The approach is encyclopedic. Admirable, yes, but a bit exhausting. The historical breadth makes for a book chock-full of fun facts, such as how in the early years of European exploration they had much trouble actually finding the great Mississippi River; oil from Spindletop sold at 3 cents a barrel in 1901; and after World War II the U.S. military used parts of Gulf islands to dispose of munitions, not considering the environmental havoc it could cause.
Vessels assist in the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon relief near the coast of Louisiana at sunset in September 2010.
(
(DMN file/AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
)
Vessels assist in the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon relief near the coast of Louisiana at sunset in September 2010. ((DMN file/AP Photo/Patrick Semansky))
Chapter 13 focuses on hurricanes, starting at the Galveston's Great Storm of 1900 (in which some of my own ancestors perished): "No so-called natural event has killed as many people — more than eight thousand, according to the National Hurricane Center . . . more than the combined tallies of dead in the 1889 Johnstown flood and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. "
Galveston in the wake of the September 1900 storm. ((DMN file/AP) )
Galveston in the wake of the September 1900 storm. ((DMN file/AP) )
The story continues through the storms of the 50s and 60s (Betsy, Carla and Camille) to Katrina, Ivan and their aftermaths. His summation of the current state of the Gulf's health is a gloomy one, in which "natural" disasters are exacerbated by bad economic and environmental policy decisions: "Louisiana has been declared a 'petrocolonial' state, and it's hard to argue with that assertion. The legislature almost always votes the industry's calling, and the courts rarely decide against it."
But all is not lost. He chooses to end this eloquent tome with an upbeat warning: "We cannot destroy or control the sea, although we can diminish its gifts."
William J. Cobb is the author of several novels, including "Goodnight, Texas," set on the Texas coast, where he grew up. He writes at williamjcobb.com/blog.
A Brown Pelican flies as the sun sets next to the Amanda Marie in the Gulf of Mexico on May 4, 2010.
(
(DMN fileAP Photo/The Houma Courier, Matt Stamey)
)
A Brown Pelican flies as the sun sets next to the Amanda Marie in the Gulf of Mexico on May 4, 2010. (
(DMN fileAP Photo/The Houma Courier, Matt Stamey)
)
QUOTED: "The Gulf is an incisive, comprehensive and entertaining portrait of one of the world’s most diverse and productive marine ecosystems."
"Amid all of the pollution, exploitation and corrosion this could easily have been a grim history of 'Paradise Lost.' But in Davis’ skilled hands it is as much love story as tragedy."
Book review: ‘The Gulf’ is an incisive, entertaining portrait of ‘America’s Sea’
By Ron Cunningham / Correspondent
Posted Mar 22, 2017 at 7:37 AM
Updated Mar 23, 2017 at 11:24 AM
He Christened it La Florida in 1513, in honor of the feast of Easter.
Ironically, it was a flower of sorts that settled Ponce de Leon’s account on his second visit, in 1521. This during a skirmish with Calusa warriors on the western coast of Spain’s new “possession.”
The dart that took his life was likely dipped in a poison extracted from the apple-like fruit of the blossoming manchineel tree.
Which is why the Spanish called it, “manzanilla de la muerte.” Little apple of death.
“Ponce de Leon’s day at the beach included a poisoned dart in the thigh,” University of Florida environmental history professor Jack Davis writes in his smoothly flowing new book “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.”
Related content
Jack Davis’ new book shares his affinity for ‘The Gulf’
March 22, 2017
Conquest was supposed to be easy. The Spanish had guns, germs and steel. It never occurred to de Leon that primitive naked savages would be stronger, healthier and fully prepared to defend themselves.
Thanks to the bounty of the estuaries that had nourished them for millennia these “raven-haired giants” ... were tall in stature because they were rich in food.”
The conquistadors ultimately prevailed, if bitterly disappointed to have no gold to show for their trouble. Meanwhile, all around them, the incalculable wealth of a future empire lay hidden in plain sight among the Gulf’s endless “coastal prairies, salt marshes, broad beaches, mangrove bulkheads, sounds, lagoons, barrier islands and river deltas.”
“The Gulf” is an incisive, comprehensive and entertaining portrait of one of the world’s most diverse and productive marine ecosystems — from its lusty birth in the chaos of shifting continental plates to its slow and agonizing death of a million cuts inflicted by oil and gas extractors, dredge-and-fill operators, “condo-canyon” developers, industrial-scale fishers, fertilizer-dependent farmers, chemical plant entrepreneurs, love-it-to-death snow birds and so many others.
Moreover, this gulf is woefully misnamed. Its pivotal role “in the geographic expansion and economic rise of the United States..,” Davis argues, ”...make the Gulf largely American.”
“The Gulf” is a natural history, but all things in nature are impacted by human hands. And Davis fills his book with larger-than-life personalities who came, saw and were swept away by the Gulf’s beauty, wealth and possibilities. The painter Winslow Homer and the poet Sidney Lanier composed odes to it. The inept pirate Gaspar inspired a Tampa tourist-drawing tradition. A New Orleans “Tabasco King” used his sauce-derived wealth to conserve Gulf wetlands. And then there is eccentric Walter Anderson, the “Thoreau of the Gulf” who abandoned his wife and children to live a hermit’s life — even riding out a hurricane — on wild barrier islands.
Davis divides his book into chapters that focus on key factors in the Gulf’s rise and fall. The shrimpers and oyster harvesters who made their fortunes on the same estuaries that fed the Calusa. The sports fishermen who came to catch tarpon — a fish they couldn’t eat but which put up the devil of a fight. The wildcatters who knew what de Leon did not — that gold can be black as well as yellow. The migratory birds reduced to the brink of extinction by hunters wanting nothing more than feathers to decorate hats for ladies.
Above all, “The Gulf” is a precautionary tale. Why is Louisiana’s coastline disintegrating into the sea? Because petro-seekers have gouged thousands of miles of canals through wetlands that once absorbed the punishing force of hurricanes. About the Gulf’s enormous “dead zone”? Well, we mine phosphate near Tampa Bay and ship it to Midwestern farms, only to have it flow back to us in the nutrient-poisoned Mississippi River. And southwest Florida’s ugly sprawl? That’s what happens when you destroy mangroves, dredge and fill to make land where water used to be, carve out thousands of finger canals and line them with endless “waterfront” vacation and retirement homes.
Davis is unsparing in his blunt, even crude, assessments of man’s impact on his beloved Gulf. If septic tank leakage is contaminating Pensacola bay it is because Alabama has “its buttocks sitting haphazardly atop the throne of western Florida.” Not that Pensacola helped very much by building a treatment plant — “an amphitheater of excrement” — near water’s edge.
Of a pioneering 1917 Texas oil gusher, Davis writes “The spilling oil rode the current down to Galveston bay and into the open Gulf, in the direction of the future.” And that Connecticut-sized dead zone? “Who could imagine that a cheerful bowl of cereal in the morning and a simple burger and fries in the evening would give the Gulf a respiratory ailment?”
And while the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill is arguably the best known and most notorious example of Gulf defilement, Davis deals with it only peripherally. Bad as it was, that 200-million gallon spill served to distract public attention from more harmful, ongoing environmental offenses. For instance, one Florida coastal river alone — the much-abused Fenholloway — has suffered far more toxins than BP ladled out, and over the course of five decades.
Amid all of the pollution, exploitation and corrosion this could easily have been a grim history of “Paradise Lost.” But in Davis’ skilled hands it is as much love story as tragedy. And he makes a valiant effort to find hope amid the ruin. Davis fills his book with tales of local environmental heroes all up and down the Gulf — many of them women — who step up against all odds to take on the polluters.
And he finds a rare success story in the tiny village of Cedar Key, whose namesake trees were long ago razed to provide pencils for school children.
With Apalachicola Bay’s once famed oyster beds in collapse, oyster cultivation is a growing enterprise in Cedar Key. This thanks to the elimination of leaky septic tanks, a modern wastewater treatment system and best management practices that reduce agricultural runoff.
This “historic little fishing village on the Gulf of Mexico has secured a healthy economy by restoring a healthy ecosystem,” Davis writes.
The moral to this story? Keeping the Gulf healthy and prosperous “means managing our own behavior, not nature’s.”
SIGN UP FOR DAILY E-MAIL
Wake up to the day’s top news, delivered to your inbox
QUOTED: "Davis never met Douglas, but he has given her the serious biography she deserves, capturing her cantankerous personality and brilliant mind, while at the same time providing the historical context necessary to fully appreciate her amazing life. It's a tour de force."
Review: 'An Everglades Providence' by Jack E. Davis hails the queen of Florida environmentalism, Marjory Stoneman Douglas
By Jeff Klinkenberg, Times Staff Writer
Saturday, April 25, 2009 4:30am
1
1
Print 0
Previous
Next
Before she was an acclaimed environmentalist and activist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a journalist and magazine writer.
Previous
Next
Previous
Next
Before she was an acclaimed environmentalist and activist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a journalist and magazine writer.
Previous
Next
Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida historian, has written a wonderful biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who put the Everglades on the map with a famous book and spent the next half-century as an environmental activist. She was Florida's Rachel Carson, our Susan B. Anthony. She delighted in speaking truth to power. • When she encountered Reubin Askew in 1971, she felt the need to remind the popular new governor that "your predecessors gave Florida land away like drunken sailors.'' Askew may have enjoyed a pro-environment reputation with voters, but by God, she wanted him to know he was on probation with her. • She scared governors, senators, developers, sugar farmers, scientists and, without a doubt, journalists. "Oh, mercy me!'' she exploded the time I'd asked a mealy-mouthed question about her favorite subject, the Everglades. Mrs. Douglas valued clarity, and I must have come across like a bumbling Lt. Columbo. • She was 102 at the time. She was tiny with snow-white hair and wore a bathrobe and a string of pearls. After the tempest passed, we toasted sunset with a stiff belt of her favorite beverage, Desmond and Duff. It was my first and last experience with Scotch, but I wasn't going to say no to a drink with Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
RELATED NEWS/ARCHIVE
Review: Jack E. Davis' 'The Gulf' is an enthralling history of the Gulf of Mexico
7 Months Ago
Events: Jack Davis to discuss, sign 'The Gulf' at Oxford Exchange
7 Months Ago
Events: Jack Davis, Lee Irby to speak at USF St. Petersburg
6 Months Ago
Davis never met Douglas, but he has given her the serious biography she deserves, capturing her cantankerous personality and brilliant mind, while at the same time providing the historical context necessary to fully appreciate her amazing life. It's a tour de force.
Listen: Douglas was born in 1890 and lived for 108 years. She was a Victorian who wrote her best-known book, The Everglades: River of Grass, in fountain pen in 1947 while sitting on her patio next to a poinciana tree — yet she lived long enough to know that her followers were spreading the word by e-mail.
For many Americans, the Everglades was a snake-infested, malarial swamp, worthy of contempt, before Douglas told them otherwise. Floridians had spent a century trying to drain it.
Douglas didn't start out as an expert. She was a journalist and magazine writer. She didn't hike, paddle, hunt or fish. She didn't like to sweat, in fact. But her curiosity had no bounds. She spent five years learning about the Everglades before publishing.
"There are no other Everglades in the world,'' was the first sentence in her book.
Douglas "combined history, science and stories never before strung together in a story-teller's voice,'' Davis writes. To her, the Everglades was more than a swamp. It was wide and shallow, and it flowed. It was alive. It was a river of grass. In her pages readers discovered a world treasure worth their respect and care.
The book marked the birth of the modern environmental movement in Florida. There would be no "Everglades Restoration Project'' without Douglas.
She was a complicated person, and Davis has given us a complicated book, a history of the Everglades as well as a biography. A ferocious researcher, Davis spares no detail in his book's 759 honking pages.
Douglas weighed 12 pounds at birth. Her mother suffered a nervous breakdown and never recovered. Her father took off. Raised by her beautiful but cold aunts, young Marjory considered herself a "greasy fat girl with one crossed eye.''
Men appreciated her brains and wit. She lobbied for the vote for women and insisted on having a career. That said, an otherwise strong woman with a father complex fell in love with a handsome man 30 years older. He turned out to be a con man, and they divorced within a year.
In 1915, she arrived in South Florida to write for her daddy's newspaper, the Miami Herald. "Although she had other brief flirtations,'' Davis writes, "she jealously guarded her independence, fearing men's domineering nature despite her strong will.''
She may have been wary, but she loved to dance. She often selected old men who had lost interest in romance or young gay men as dancing partners. In old age, she told people she never experienced sex after her divorce.
She loved dining out — for reasons that included the lack of a stove in her kitchen. If she had to cook, she used a hot plate. She loved reading, valued intellectual conversation, admired someone who would argue a point to death.
She never learned to drive. She survived Florida summers in a house without air conditioning. The house, by the way, was small, 943 square feet, and I can almost imagine Davis walking off those feet to get his facts right.
As her vision failed, Davis reports, Douglas read her collection of Dickens novels through an eight-power magnifying glass. As she aged, she ate what her friends prepared, the notorious white diet. Her nightly supper of turkey breast, mashed potatoes and vanilla ice cream proved to be enough to fuel her passion: protecting the Everglades no matter what.
When she was 94, she attended a crowded, controversial public hearing about a development proposed for the edge of the Everglades. When she rose to her feet in the sticky gym, all 4 feet 10 inches of her, somebody yelled "Go back to Russia, Granny.'' After the catcalls subsided she said, "Look. I'm an old lady. I've been here since 8 o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat.'' She said her piece, and the county commissioners voted her way, against the development.
She believed that work and thinking kept a person young; at age 100, she continued researching a new book, a biography of Henry Hudson, whose Green Mansions she had long admired. She couldn't see well enough to write, but she thought clearly enough to dictate to secretaries. She never finished the book.
She passed the last three years of her life in a miserable fog, mostly sleeping, but occasionally waking to make a comment or answer a question.
"How do you feel?'' a friend wanted to know one day.
"Like a caged bird, my dear,'' she said.
She never prayed. She believed in no god. "She approached life as an explorer and inquisitor,'' Davis writes. "In knowledge gained through personal experience and education and possessed within the inner self, she found the animating force of life. What she sought in the world — knowledge — brought her closer to all living things.''
She passed away in her sleep on May 14, 1998. Her ashes were scattered in a secret place in Everglades National Park. A flock of blackbirds sang the requiem.
Jeff Klinkenberg writes about Florida culture for the St. Petersburg Times. His latest book collection of essays is "Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators."
An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century
By Jack E. Davis
University of Georgia Press,
759 pages, $34.95
Meet the author
Jack Davis will talk about and sign his book at 7 p.m. Monday at the Poynter Institute, 801 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. A reception will follow at 8:30 at Williams House, on the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus at 511 Second St. S.
Review: 'An Everglades Providence' by Jack E. Davis hails the queen of Florida environmentalism, Marjory Stoneman Douglas 04/25/09 [Last modified: Thursday, April 30, 2009 1:56pm]
Photo reprints | Article reprints
© 2017 Tampa Bay Times
QUOTED: "
Throughout the book, Davis paints a sensitive portrait of white and black Natchez in the troublesome years since the Depression. His personal engagement with the city and its people make for compelling reading, particularly in those sections at the start of each chapter where he relates his encounters with local residents during the course of his work. Yet despite his earnest desire to represent white racial attitudes fairly, he does not allow white southerners the easy sentimentality and intellectual dishonesty that have comforted them through civil war and civil rights."
H-South
Home
Discussions
Reviews
Resources
Links
Blogs
Search H-South
Go
Campbell on Davis, 'Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930'
Author:
Jack E. Davis
Reviewer:
Gavin J. Campbell
Jack E. Davis. Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. xiii + 351 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-2585-4.
Reviewed by Gavin J. Campbell (Graduate School of American Studies, Doshisha University)
Published on H-South (June, 2002)
The Long Shadow of Jim Crow
The Long Shadow of Jim Crow
Not far from my office in Kyoto, Japan sits a Shinto shrine that contains a monument honoring Japanese pilots from what they here call "the Pacific War." A bold airman gazes towards the sky as a multitude of Japanese bombers and escorts fly in bas relief across a bronze sky. Raised on John Wayne movies and Mount Suribachi photos, I confess that the whole thing startled me and even struck me as rather presumptuous. But then, I quickly reflected, Allied pilots had no monopoly on bravery, nor did the families of Allied aviators grieve more intently than did the Japanese. It's not a startling revelation, of course, but it is one that acquires a particular force when seen in a new context.
Jack E. Davis approaches white Natchez with a similarly unsettled balance of skepticism and understanding. On the one hand he fears and loathes much of what whites in the Magnolia State have stood for and much of what they have done, yet he confesses that his personal encounters with them "began to tear at the fabric of negative stereotypes I had woven" (p. 17). Race Against Time is Davis' attempt to understand this strange alchemy of suspicion and hospitality, hatred and kindness, and to expose how these obverse attitudes worked in tandem to maintain white supremacy. The many-headed hydra that is racism, Davis argues, has not yet been slain despite losing its legal and legislative heads, because these assaults only took on the more public aspects of the south's racial hierarchies. "White supremacy meant more than political and economic dominance," Davis writes. "Equally important, if not more so, was cultural supremacy, which imposed upon society so-called white values of honesty, intelligence, diligence, goodwill, morality, and citizenship" (pp. 169-70). Race Against Time, then, explores how racism's intractable power comes not from its enshrinement in monuments and laws, but from its tenacious hold on Southern culture.
Davis is certainly not the first to hit upon this insight. In addition to the slew of works on "whiteness" that have largely concentrated on the urban North, Joel Williamson's Crucible of Race and, more recently, Grace Hale's Making Whiteness study the souls of white folks within the overwhelmingly bi-racial Southern context.[1] Like Davis, these authors attempt to fathom the myriad means whites have employed to sustain their power and privilege not only through legal manipulations, economic exploitation, and physical intimidation, but through advertising, popular literature, films, and music as well. What Davis adds to this existing literature is a close-textured examination of one city over time. And he could hardly find a more fitting stage for his tale than a city that made itself a theater: Natchez, Mississippi.
Natchez is a kind of historian's paradise for, as Davis cleverly remarks, it's a city that "fanaticizes history like other southern communities do high-school football" (p. 15). Hence, Davis pays particularly close attention to how whites have interpreted the past to establish racial hierarchies as normative and timeless. He makes clear throughout that white versions of southern history, whether promoted in school textbooks, or in the city's famous annual pageant and "Pilgrimage," were ultimately aimed at bolstering the contemporary racial status quo by giving it the sanction of time. The Old South, which became the object of virtually cultish fanaticism among well-heeled white Natchezians, made the point eloquently. It was in those days, whites said with a lazy touch of their hoop skirt and with the glint of their julep cups, that the races lived harmoniously because each remained within their own culture. War and Reconstruction, whites bitterly complained, had destroyed this balance by allowing the freed slaves to imagine assuming the trappings of white culture.
Yet the cultivated manners, polished educations, and elegant mansions the freed people accumulated during the post-war period did little to dislodge racial prejudice among white Natchezians, Davis writes. "No matter how hard they tried, blacks could never be fully white as long as the black culture existed" (p. 105). Even with the onset of manufacturing and the arrival of decidedly New South institutions amidst the Old South mansions, white racial attitudes remained virtually unchanged because the cultural framework that sustained them never came under attack. By basing their presumed superiority not merely on economic and political advantage, but on cultural hierarchies, whites built a fail-proof system that proved supple enough to absorb the transformations wrought by the city's industrialization and by the nation's changing racial climate.
Though asked throughout the century to reprise their role as "faithful darkies," local African Americans in the civil rights period not surprisingly grew increasingly irate with the historical interpretation whites fashioned for tourists, and with the moderate black civic leaders of the 1930s whose style of race relations had responded to the dictates of a receding era. As the physical intimidation and frequent bombs made clear, the 1960s was no less dangerous than Jim Crow days, but by the 1960s blacks no longer lent their music or their bodies to the "Pilgrimage" and they measured their collective might with a series of economic boycotts that proved devastatingly effective.
These flashes of indignation became a full-scare conflagration by the end of the 1960s, and not surprisingly, scalded many in the white community. "We didn't know they were unhappy," one woman admitted to Davis (p. 195). Although civil rights leaders targeted their efforts at voter registration, desegregation, and political representation, Davis cautions readers against taking an entirely political view of Natchez's civil rights agitation. The movement was more "than the struggle for freedom," it was "about the social recognition of their culture" (p. 195). Whites understood this as well, and thus the stakes and the trials were tremendous and the rewards more highly contested.
As the statement about the "recognition of their culture" makes clear, the book's most troubling shortcoming is its uneven treatment of race as a cultural invention. The problem haunts Davis in a number of places. Though conceding that "race itself is a myth....[and] an invention" (p. 8), he nevertheless often relies on the very terms of that myth, asserting as fact precisely what he aims to countermand. Describing a dilemma the black nouveaux riche faced in the post-Reconstruction city, he argues that "the ascendant group of blacks preferred whiteness to blackness," but this statement presupposes that "whiteness" and "blackness" were immutable categories, when, as these very sorts of African Americans quickly learned, whites could and did change the markers of whiteness (p. 91).
He makes similar assertions throughout, writing, for example, that "Jews were physically white, of course," (p. 5) or that "most of the black upper class were probably brown in skin color, neither dark nor fair, with brown eyes and wavy or tight black hair--on a whole darker than the Reconstruction generation of the black elite" (p. 95). This fine attention to detail counteracts his main point that "race is a myth." Jews were assuredly not "white, of course." They were white by the consent of those who held the keys to that particular kingdom. At other times he writes as if culture and race are synonymous--declaring for instance, that Jews, "never fully turned away from their heritage" and that they embraced "their own culture" (p. 113). In so doing, he short-circuits his argument that culture is not racially fixed. In short, Davis tries to have it both ways. He claims both that culture is detached from race and that it is racially organic.
Moreover, because he largely accepts races as culturally and physically unified entities--there are whites, there are blacks, there are Jews--he tends to brush aside serious splits within these groups. At one point, for example, he concludes that "many whites striving for open-mindedness during the twilight decades of the twentieth century were beset by an inherent impulse to generalize about race and culture in the ways of their predecessors" (p. 273; emphasis added). Writing that white racial attitudes are "inherent" defeats the central premise of his argument and overlooks important disruptions within the white community about how best to preserve their privileges amidst the assault launched by civil rights activists.
Examples of intra-racial disputes among whites along class lines are, on the whole, not examined carefully enough (see, for example pp. 137, 182, 186, 254). For instance, Davis says nothing of the motives of one U.S. district court judge, a native Mississippian, who lifted an injunction against the Natchez NAACP, or what moved another Natchez local to deliver a sermon titled "One Can Not Be a Christian and a Segregationist, Too" (pp. 186, 254). One might claim that these men were anomalies, but that too easily dismisses what these two examples make clear and what needs more careful attention: there are different kinds of white supremacy. Lumping all whites together as ultimately bound together in their whiteness ignores the variety of means they used to justify and to establish the culture of segregation, and, equally important, the varieties of whiteness.
Throughout the book, Davis paints a sensitive portrait of white and black Natchez in the troublesome years since the Depression. His personal engagement with the city and its people make for compelling reading, particularly in those sections at the start of each chapter where he relates his encounters with local residents during the course of his work. Yet despite his earnest desire to represent white racial attitudes fairly, he does not allow white southerners the easy sentimentality and intellectual dishonesty that have comforted them through civil war and civil rights. Hence Davis writes with urgency, afraid lest the south as a whole is certain to lose the Race Against Time because whites still refuse to embrace the bi-racial nature of southern society and culture. Only by discarding cherished notions of cultural hierarchies, Davis insists, can white Natchezians call upon the better angels of their nature to create the harmonious society they have for so long celebrated and so effectively sold to tourists.
Notes
[1]. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=6392
Citation: Gavin J. Campbell. Review of Davis, Jack E., Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930. H-South, H-Net Reviews. June, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6392
Copyright © 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
Add a Comment
0 RepliesReply to this post