A collection of writings of Douglas Helms on topics ranging from the history of the cotton boll weevil and the soils of the South to the history of soil and water conservation programs in the United States. Helms served over a more than thirty year career as a historian in the public service at the National Archives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

This volume is a collection of the writings of Douglas Helms on topics ranging from the history of the cotton boll weevil and the soils of the South to the history of soil and water conservation programs in the United States. They were authored over a more than thirty year career as a historian in the public service at the National Archives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The current publishing environment has experienced a drastic change in the way content is created, delivered, and acquired, particularly for libraries. With the increasing importance of digital publishing, more than half the titles published in the United States are self-published. With this growth in self-published materials, librarians, publishers, and vendors have been forced to rethink channels of production, distribution, and access as it applies to the new content. Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries will address multiple aspects of how public and academic libraries can deal with the increase in self-published titles. While both academic and public libraries have started to grapple with the burgeoning issues associated with self-published books, many difficulties remain. To develop effective policies and procedures, stakeholders must now tackle questions associated with the transformation of the publishing landscape. Obstacles to self-publishing include the lack of reviews, the absence of cataloging and bibliographic control, proprietary formats for e-books, and the difficulty for vendors in providing these works.General chapters will include information on reviewing sources, cataloging and bibliographic control, and vendor issues. Information addressing public libraries issues will highlight initiatives to make self-published materials available at the Los Gatos Public Library in California and the Kent District Library in Michigan. Chapters on academic library issues will address why self-published materials are important for academic institutions, especially those with comprehensive collecting interests. Several self-published authors focus on how they attempt to make their works more suitable for public libraries. Finally, the book concludes with a bibliographic essay on self-publishingAs the term "traditional publishing" begins to fade and new content producers join the conversation, librarians, publishers, and vendors will play an important role in facilitating and managing the shift.

Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land abuse. Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies uses the unlikely story of Providence Canyon—and the 1930s contest over its origins and meaning—to recount the larger history of dramatic human-induced soil erosion across the South and to highlight the role that the region and its erosive agricultural history played in the rise of soil science and soil conservation in America. More than that, though, the book is a meditation on the ways in which our persistent mental habit of separating nature from culture has stunted our ability to appreciate places like Providence Canyon and to understand the larger history of American conservation.

Essays challenging the increasing denial of the AIDS crisis and the rise of conservative gay politics. In Melancholia and Moralism, Douglas Crimp confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society. With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist. Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films "Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical "Zero Patience," Gregg Bordowitz's video "Fast Trip, Long Drop," the Names Project Quilt, and the annual "Day without Art."