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Chesterfield Smith was one of the boldest lawyers of the twentieth century. A child of a poor, broken household but also a child of a politically connected family, Smith grew up aimless. His World War II combat experience changed him. He returned an ambitious and impatient man who had learned from the European theater what systemized hate and prejudice could do. Smith rose fast, building his small firm to a goliath, leading the Florida Bar, and masterminding the creation of a new state constitution. As president of the American Bar Association during Watergate, his was one of the earliest voices calling for Nixon to obey the law or resign. At home, Smith urged his lawyers to improve the practice of law, and the world around them, by “doing good.” Smith’s larger-than-life personality and drive to improve his surroundings irritated some and inspired many.

This book is a comprehensive account of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and its efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation’s past. It argues that, especially prior to World War II, the DAR’s conservative white middle-class members played a vital role in private citizens’ efforts to both bolster patriotism and guard the nation’s gendered and racial boundaries through commemorative practices. The Daughters engaged in patriotic activism long believed to be the domain of men and deliberately challenged male-centered accounts of US nation-building. At the same time, however, their tales about the past helped reinforce traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a strong-held belief that any challenge to these traditions would jeopardize the nation’s stability. In a similar fashion, the organization frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism, but deliberately used memory to consolidate Anglo-Saxon whiteness and keep the nation’s racial divisions in place. By closely examining these ambiguities, this study sheds fresh light on white conservative women’s remarkable agency in US nationalism and explains the tenacity of a particular nationalist ideology that deemed ingrained gender and race hierarchies vital to America’s unity and progress.

Lunar Outfitters chronicles the history of the Apollo space suit and how it was developed and produced. It focuses on the employees of ILC Industries, the maker of these lunar suits, and highlights the first engineer who saw the need for such a suit and those who came along later to advance the suit and make it the best space suit in the industry. Details and stories in the text describe many hurdles, such as the challenges this relatively small company faced in convincing NASA they were capable of fulfilling the contract. Later chapters provide technical details of the various Apollo model suits and how they were assembled, including the materials used.

Tracing the development of the field of southern women’s history over the past half century, Sisterly Networks shows how pioneering feminists laid the foundation for a strong community of sister scholars and delves into the work of an organization central to this movement, the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Launched in 1970, the SAWH provided programming, mentoring, fundraising, and outreach efforts to support women historians working to challenge the academic establishment. In this book, leading scholars reflect on their own careers in southern history and their experiences as women historians amid this pathbreaking expansion and revitalization of the field. Their stories demonstrate how women created new archival collections, expanded historical categories to include gender and sexuality, reimagined the roles and significance of historical women, wrote pioneering monographs, and mentored future generations of African American women and other minorities who entered the academy and contributed to public discourse. Providing a lively roundtable discussion of the state of the field, contributors comment on present and future work environments and current challenges in higher education and academic publishing. They offer profound and provocative insights on the ways scholars can change the future through radically rewriting the gender biases of recorded history.

Tampa: Impressions of an Emigrant is a translation of Tampa: impresiones de emigrante written by Cuban author Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte, published in 1897 in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, translated from the Spanish by Noel M. Smith. Gálvez was an early diaspora writer in the costumbrismo genre, which emphasized the depiction of everyday manners and customs of a particular social milieu. Gálvez emigrated from Havana in 1896 to escape the Cuban War of Independence and join the Cuban exile community in Tampa. Gálvez was a champion baseball player in the earliest years of Cuban baseball, a lawyer/prosecutor/judge, and journalist/author. His charming and opinionated first-person narrative is in four parts. Part 1 begins with the escalation of the Spanish war effort that prompted his sea voyage to Tampa, followed by part 2 and descriptions of Tampa’s people and activities, geography, landmarks, municipal features, and cultural pursuits. Parts 3 and 4 extensively discuss many aspects of the Cuban exile community in Ybor City and West Tampa, including the patriotic pro-independence fervor that gripped the emigrants. He names notable personages in the exile community and describes their efforts to support the war against Spain and recounts his struggles working as a door-to-door salesman and as a lector (reader) in a cigar factory. Thirty historical photographs and newspaper clippings illuminate the text.