In January 2011, police in St. Petersburg, Florida, raided the home of Hydra Lacy, an African-American man charged with domestic battery. Lacy hid in the tight garret of his one-story house, shots were fired, and Lacy as well as two officers died in the confrontation. The city of St. Petersburg demolished the structure and removed the rubble to the local landfill, before a crime scene investigation could be conducted. The fill sits on a swale, in a mostly African American section of St. Petersburg, near a playground and along a creek where the Aramus guarauna, or limpkin can be found – a bird endemic to Florida and a rare sighting, particularly in a city. This poem uses the principles of structuration to examine silences and gaps in our collective stories of both nature and race.

Missionaries in Florida - Account of the Martyrs in the Provinces of La Florida. By Luis Jerónimo de Oré. Edited and translated by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Nancy Vogeley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 182. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 77 Issue 2

Reviewed by: Timelines of American Literature ed. by Cody Marrs, Christopher Hager Thomas Hallock Timelines of American Literature cody marrs and christopher hager, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019 349 pp. Lively, polemic, sharply written, and ingeniously researched, Timelines of American Literature makes a collective case for reconceiving temporality in American cultural studies. This scholarly assemblage brings together twenty-one shorter essays, a prologue and afterword, plus a handful of sample syllabi, to address an important question: besides wars, which have long served as period markers, how else can we divvy up the phases of our teaching and research? After a (too) brief introduction, the editors kick off the discussion with an article that readers of this journal may already know (Sandra Gustafson’s “What’s in a Date?”), and a pleasure of this volume comes from hearing the response of established voices alongside more recent, emerging scholars. For the graduate student looking for a field guide, or in my case an older hand in need of a refresher, this volume might double as a state-of-the-field. The collection pulls off a red carpet vibe. Timelines disavows linear chronology (long a default organization), and the book celebrates scholarly fracturing, which makes the contents difficult to explain. The bulk of the book falls into two parts, “Prehistories and Transitions” and “Ages and the Long Present,” with those divided into two further subsections. Many of the chapters feel like an expanded pet project or the distillation of a first monograph (which in fact they are), explaining the overall prospective quality, occasional jumpiness, and provocative [End Page 240] dishevel. The “Prehistories” section of part 1 leads off with a pocket history of braille typography, by Erica Fretwell, raising the question (literally) how we reorganize history from a particular subgroup. Clearing the ground for new discussion, each chapter in this subsection offers a different set of terms: blindness (Fretwell), property (Adrienne Brown), Native sovereignty (Phillip Round), and Mormon cosmology (Jared Hickman). The following section, “Transitions,” circles back to temporality through patroonage in Dutch New York (Jennifer Greiman); the year 1973, “When It Changed” (Gerry Canavan); Confederate memorialization (Coleman Hutchison); and a pair of articles that come straight from this volume’s temporal wheelhouse, from 1857 and the 1820–60 survey (Andrew Kopec, Robert S. Levine). The fun of reading this book is also its principal frustration. Stripped of an organizational tool that has sat close at hand for too long, making us all a bit lazy, this volume also struggles with the over- words: overview and overlap. Several authors put this confusion on memorable display, including Gustafson (who begins with a teasing multiple-choice quiz) and Dana Luciano, whose bristling open letter to the Anthropocene leads off part 2. As the volume settles into this part’s first section, “Ages,” an argumentative pattern emerges: contributors start from some quirky or overlooked vantage point, then pull a loose string from the canonical tapestry, using the often highly specific example to “destabilize” (190), “upset” (211), “force us to broaden” (213), and so on. The suggested epochs range from plausible to groundbreaking to playful to parodic. We get a series of “Ages”: the Age of Latinidad (Jesse Alemán), required for all English majors; of Van Buren (Justine S. Murison), convincing, if difficult to imagine in application; of Appalachian literature (Wise), a model for regional studies; of Civil War to civil rights, argued narrowly through one essay by Ralph Ellison (Michael LeMaheiu); and “The Age of Warhol” (Bryan Waterman), sign me up. By the second section of part 2, literary history shows its form less as contiguous timeline, more as evocation and loop—through neo–slave narratives (Yogita Goyal); through propaganda (Russ Castronovo); through computer coding and Poe’s reception history (Caroline Levander); microeconomics (Annie McClanahan); politics and formalism (Rachel Greenwald Smith); and through that everlasting form which takes us from the Spanish Mediterranean, to Puritan New England, through Cooper, to Abu Ghraib and Beloved, the captivity narrative (Birgit Brander Rasmussen). [End Page 241] Even as the usual chapter summary seems arbitrary, the chapters do hold thematic coherence. With this review in mind, I found myself drafting my own table of contents on the book...

"Liquid landscape: geography and settlement at the edge of early America." Journal of Cultural Geography, 36(1), pp. 111–112

Starting from Igbo Landing, site of an 1803 slave rebellion off coastal Georgia, this article compares written and folkloric accounts to question the status of the archive in early American studies. Ongoing stories of the Flying African, linked to the site, suggest space rather than time or periodization as the most useful rubric for framing early Americanist studies today.

A course in urban nature writing demands new theoretical frameworks. The essays for the class actually have a triangular structure, requiring three levels of inquiry—a conceptual premise, rhetorical modeling, and field observation. Some of the more thoughtful come to see the urban waterway as something more than an object of pity. With the domed stadium slated for demolition, city leaders and developers have eyed the former Gas Plant area for gentrification; local blacks, meanwhile, harbor strong feelings about the broken promises that came with "urban renewal." At a particularly spirited moment, a panelist mentioned the array of fruit trees once found in the city—different varieties of mangoes, guavas, avocados, mulberries, and plums. A meeting of built and natural environment on Booker Creek, to return to the Greg Garrard quote from the beginning of the essay, has the potential to restore "social virtues in the cityscape.".

‘A’ is for Acronym:Teaching Hawthorne in a Performance-Based World Thomas Hallock (bio) Gracie booked the flight. A twenty-eight-year old senior, she had never been on a plane. She had traveled outside Florida once. Before college, Gracie worked fifty hours a week at a Clearwater Barnes and Noble. When she returned to school, she vowed not be overlooked, so she dyed her hair blue. Not that she needed the attention; her papers are flawless. Nor did she, or the other students, need the extra credit I half-jokingly promised my Hawthorne class if they journeyed to snowbound Massachusetts for Spring Break. Gracie and three fellow English majors—Matthew, Lyndsey, and Lyndsey’s husband—reversed the usual student route and planned a Boston-Salem-Concord pilgrimage. In lieu of a final essay, they joined forces with Chloe (a twenty-one-year old freshman with spiky pink hair and double-pierced lower lip) to make a video of the trip. Chloe and Grace closed out the semester with a scarlet “A” tattooed near their hearts. I have not seen the tattoos. I would never ask to see them. But as their professor and a new department head, my heart beats in sympathy with their ink. I have yet to grow my bureaucratic scarfskin, and I take personally the pressures that come with working in a STEM-driven state. Every Monday at two o’clock, during my “Scarlet A” class last Spring, I could shut the door and silence the buzzing administrivia, conversations about vaporized faculty lines, and the ugly acronyms—SCH’s and KPI’s, ALC’s and SLO’s. The worst of these, the Gates Foundation’s performance-based funding, throws a rude thumb at the liberal arts.1 Florida measures university success on a strict cost-benefit analysis: student retention, years to graduation, and the financial return on a degree, determined by average alumni [End Page 116] salary one year after diploma. Much of this record-keeping makes sense. With students entering pre-med, Biology needs the bucks. But the English major in me also smells some rotten arithmetic. Even though we graduate the Gracies of the world, there is no spreadsheet column that can tabulate our achievement. Performance-based funding favors students who choose Accounting over English because the former earn more right out of college; yet over the course of a career, we know, the humanities degree will often outperform more technical training. My older brother, an English major and Classics minor who lived hand-to-mouth through his twenties, now makes far more than my two other siblings, an architect and former mechanical engineer. The sages of Tallahassee work from a short-sighted model. And why do we define success materially, my students cry. Here’s the kicker: my department will grow only if our graduates accept the kinds of dead-end jobs Gracie fled. In his preface to The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom House,” Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the cost of soul-sapping work; among the relics in the narrator’s Salem office is a moth-eaten embroidered “A.” When we discuss this section in class, I tell the students a story from my own transitional years as a wage-earning adult. I was in graduate school, temping for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in midtown Manhattan. As long as I was typing, Pfizer execs did not care what I was doing, so one somnolent summer afternoon I punched Hawthorne’s description of the letter into the computer and ran it through Microsoft’s primitive Gramatik program: “It had been wrought, as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework, and the stitch (as I am assured by ladies conversant with such mysteries) gives evidence of a new forgotten art, not be recovered, even by picking out the threads.”2 Gramatik flagged the passive voice, the sinuous syntax and the parentheses as “unclear.” Which was, of course, Hawthorne’s point exactly. Careful readers of The Scarlet [End Page 117] Letter never discover the precise meaning of “A.” As the story nears its end, we should learn what the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, father of Hester’s child, hides on his chest. The moment we expect the secret...

This paper examines the difficulties of cultivating, and teaching, an environmental aesthetic from within cities. Starting from a particular pedagogical situation, a nature writing class in Florida, the essay examines the broader disconnect in the 'green humanities' between natural and built environments. After a review of how cities complicate standard environmental aesthetics, I propose a solution involving sustainability: by establishing community in one place over long periods of time, and by academics themselves maintaining the commitment to the communities we purport to serve.

On a trip to Mexico City a few years back, I made the requisite pilgrimage to the Museo Nacional de Antropología. Actually I went twice, first as part of an NEH summer seminar focused on Aztlán, the mythico-historic homeland of the Aztec people, then a second time on my own, to understand how stories of nationhood use a native subject. The Museo Nacional, which opened in the 1960s, showcases treasures from across Mexico, although the floor plan clearly favors the Sala Azteca—the room devoted to Tenochtitlan, the empire sacked by Hernan Cortés and the spongy foundation of today's capital city. Most of the museum has two floors, the first to showcase historic artifacts and the second (less-trafficked) floor for ethnography. But the Sala Azteca has no second story. Tenochtitlan, by architectural logic, lives within a timeless present. Gray granite walls stretch from floor to ceiling. High on the inside wall, selections of Nahuatl poetry, translated into Spanish, admonish: “This is your glory / This is your mandate / hold these principles to the present / and never forget them.”1 The famed Calendar Stone, set alongside a photograph of Porfirio Díaz, looms over the center-rear third of the room. One has to wait to snap a picture in front of the Calendar Stone; it is a national icon, endlessly reproduced, purchasable in gift shops from Cancún to Juarez, long featured on the deep green jerseys of Mexico's perennially disappointing football squad. The Sala Azteca uses one historic group to speak for a broader, unstable political unit. If the Aztec-Mexica represent all Mexico, then the capital, the heart of the Distrito Federal, represents an equally glorious—if less bloody—Tenochtitlan. Despite the constant ring of protest in the Zócalo, the statehouse square just a few miles down the Paseo de la Reforma, the national museum sounds a message of unity. And this political fiction starts from a map. At the threshold of the Sala Azteca is an inlaid floor map that outlines Mexico's present-day boundaries. As we enter the room, we step onto a white marble platform then over this graphic argument, set in black tile.

Journal Article Chicken Aubade Get access Thomas Hallock Thomas Hallock thallock@mail.usf.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 20, Issue 2, September 2013, Page 426, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/ist033 Published: 12 April 2013

Journal Article Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature Get access Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. By Christopher P. Iannini. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P/Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012. 296 pp. Cloth $45.00. Thomas Hallock Thomas Hallock University of South Florida St. Petersburg thallock@stpt.usf.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 20, Issue 1, Winter 2013, Pages 192–193, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/iss138 Published: 04 February 2013