Dismal Swamp Research Articles

Quantifying Post‐Colonial Peat Carbon Loss From a Drained Forested Peatland, Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, USA

AbstractPeatland carbon storage is increasingly threatened by the combination of land‐use change and climate variability, though carbon losses from land‐use changes that span centuries are difficult to quantify, particularly in systems where little undisturbed area remains. Here we use a combination of vegetation change, fire history, and calculations of excess ash mass to quantify carbon loss in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (GDS NWR), USA, a highly impacted oligotrophic temperate peat swamp. Our results indicate that ditch construction that began in the Colonial Era in the late 1700s and continued into the mid‐20th century across the swamp resulted in shifts from cypress‐tupelo swamps to a combination of maple‐gum and pine pocosin forests, consistent with drying surface conditions. Two large smoldering fires (2008, 2011) that were exacerbated by surface drainage, shifted vegetation from swamp to marsh, consumed peat over 25 km2, and caused losses of 1.05–1.34 Tg C due to peat burning. Across the Refuge as a whole, up to 48.2 Tg C has been lost to peat oxidation since ditch construction. Both stocks and rates of carbon loss remain higher than post‐disturbance accumulation across most of GDS NWR, suggesting that existing efforts to block drainages to elevate water tables may not be enough to offset carbon losses. Rewetting heavily impacted surface peats may reduce peat oxidation and carbon loss, and shift vegetation toward hydrologic conditions preferred by pre‐disturbance cypress‐tupelo swamps.

WITHDRAWN: ‘Rights for human at stake’ – Echoes from Henry Wadsworth longfellow’s the slave in the Dismal swamp

Human rights are meant for every human being, immaterial of race, gender, ethnic origin, place of residence, belief, speech, colour, etc. We are entitled to human rights without inequity. All these rights are interdependent. The concept of Human Rights is as old as Art. At one level, this artistic concern reveals itself through the investigation and supposition of Human Rights. Human Rights Literature is a genre in literary field that deals with human rights problems, and hence supports the principles of human rights. The objective of Human Rights Literature is to inspire for action, that tends to be a basic and vital constituent of the tussle for preservation of human rights. The literary work The Slave in the Dismal Swamp by Henry Longfellow is taken to study how human is deprived of his own rights. This paper envisages the pathetic state of human life in which the very right to exercise and experience the ordained rights at stake.

Wild Paradise: Hope in the Great Dismal Swamp

Wild Paradise: Hope in the Great Dismal Swamp Ridwaana Allen Although the Great Dismal Swamp is as formidable as it sounds, there is so much more to its story. A forested peatland straddling the North Carolina/Virginia border, this mixture of forests and marshes is home to 119 varieties of wildflowers, 54 tree species, 41 kinds of shrubs, 35 aquatic plant species, 29 ferns and vines, along with 81 grasses, sedges, and rushes (Mohlenbrock 2012). Over 200 species of birds have been identified at the swamp, with 93 reported to nest there. Other inhabitants include various reptiles and amphibians, otters, bats, raccoons, minks, foxes, gray squirrels, white-tailed deer, and less commonly, black bears and bobcats (Wilson 2001). The Great Dismal Swamp’s past is as rich as its biodiversity. The swamp is full of narratives, some conflicting. To early settlers, it was a wilderness to be tamed. To poets and writers, it was inspiration. To Native Americans, Africans, and African Americans, it was a refuge – an alternative to colonialism and slavery. When the English first began exploring the Virginia lowlands in the 1600s, “dismal” meant “swamp” in that region, and the terms were used interchangeably (Tidwell 2002). In 1728, William Byrd II, a colonel in the British army and wealthy plantation owner, led a group of surveyors into the swamp to help demarcate the border between Virginia and North Carolina (Hansen 2010). Colonel Byrd – who believed that the Great Dismal Swamp and its air were so foul, no living thing could survive there, and birds would not fly over it – is credited with naming it (ibid.). After his visit, Colonel Byrd wanted to drain the swamp and turn it into an extensive hemp farm. He also wanted to use canals to connect the swamp to the Pasquotank River in North Carolina to the Elizabeth River in Virginia (Tidwell 2002). After traveling the swamp on horseback, George Washington described it as a “glorious paradise.” He wanted to build a north-south canal to connect Chesapeake Bay and the Albemarle Sound (Pettie 1976). In 1763, Washington’s Great Dismal Land Company started clearing the swamp for rice farming (Belcastro 1998). When that venture failed, they turned to logging, which was much more profitable. Drainage ditches and roads were built to facilitate the logging (Belcastro 1998). Later in the 1760s, a canal known as “Washington’s Ditch” was dug between Lake Drummond and the Nansemond River (Pettie 1976). In the 1790s, the Dismal Swamp Canal was dug (Mohlenbrock 2012). Both remain to this day. Worth mentioning is that most excavation, production, and transport was accomplished using Black slave labor (Sayers et al. 2007). [End Page 1] Arguably, the Great Dismal Swamp exists as much in the physical as in the imagination. It served as literary inspiration for Robert Frost, and as the backdrop for other writers including Thomas Moore’s “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Dred, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” (Pettie 1976). While the Great Dismal Swamp may have inspired capitalistic resource exploitation, poetry, and prose, others had different motivations. Between circa 1630 and 1860, Native Americans and thousands of African Americans occupied the swamp (Sayers 2006). While it remains unknown how many Native Americans occupied the swamp, African Americans numbered in the thousands as maroons and enslaved laborers (ibid.). Three time periods appear to emerge, along with corresponding geographies. According to archaeological finds, disenfranchised Native Americans likely lived along the swamp edges to maintain selective access to the outside world between 1630 and 1710 (Sayers et al. 2007). One form of resistance to the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery was marronage, which is “the act of removing oneself from enslavement or running away” (Agorsah 1994). Between 1700 and 1865, maroons occupied swamp edges, small islands, and the interior (Sayers et al. 2007). Enslaved laborers occupied the swamp between 1765 and 1865 in canal-adjacent areas, and performed various tasks including canal excavation, barge pushing, and shingle making (ibid.). Hiding in plain sight, at least one maroon community worked among the enslaved individuals and free Black and White laborers for the construction of railroads (Maris-Wolf 2013). The groups...

Impact of control structures on hydrologic restoration within the Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp (GDS) is a 45,000-ha state and federally protected Coastal Plain peatland located on the border of North Carolina and Virginia that contains stands of Bald cypress and the globally threatened Atlantic white cedar. Centuries of drainage and logging have substantially altered the hydrology of the GDS, negatively affecting its ecosystem structure and function. To restore a seasonally flooded, saturated hydrologic regime to portions of the swamp, adjustable water control structures (WCS) were installed at strategic locations within existing drainage ditches. The objective of this study was to determine if the installation of the WCSs significantly altered the hydropatterns of two target restoration areas, resulting in hydrologic conditions comparable to nearby reference sites with desired forest communities. The water table (WT) was monitored for three years prior to WCS installation (pre-WCS) and three years after WCS installation (post-WCS). Comparison of WT data from the pre and post-WCS periods, using jurisdictional wetland criteria and empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDFs), indicated increased saturated conditions within the target restoration areas following installation of the WCS. Paired Before-After Control-Impact (BACIP) statistical analysis revealed the WCS installation had a significant positive impact on WT levels in the target restoration areas relative to the reference sites. Hydrologic restoration will aid the effort to restore target forest communities within the swamp, reduce fire susceptibility, prevent peat oxidation, maintain carbon storage, and reduce non-target vegetation competition.

Carbon Chemistry of Intact Versus Chronically Drained Peatlands in the Southeastern USA

AbstractThe Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (GDS) is a large temperate swamp in Virginia/North Carolina, USA with peat soils historically resistant to microbial decomposition. However, this peatland has been subject to ~200 years of disturbance during which extensive drainage, fire suppression, and widespread logging have increased decomposition and dramatically decreased the distribution of Atlantic white cedar (AWC). The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of long‐term drainage and AWC loss on the carbon chemistry of GDS peats. Peat cores were collected from three drained GDS vegetation communities (pocosin, AWC, and red maple‐black gum) and compared to cores collected from an intact, undrained AWC peatland at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge (AR) in North Carolina. The AR peats had higher lignin content in the deeper peat intervals, and lignin content and percent organic carbon were largely invariant with depth compared to the GDS peats. The concentrations of syringyl group phenols were greater in the surface layers of GDS peats, likely reflecting the selective removal of AWC and transition from gymnosperms to angiosperms. Acid to aldehyde ratios for vanillyl and syringyl group phenols indicated that the GDS peats were more decomposed, particularly at depth, and that this occurred under aerobic conditions. Moreover, solid‐state 13C NMR confirmed a coincident loss of carbohydrates and increase in recalcitrant by‐products of carbohydrate degradation with depth. These data indicate that long‐term drainage has accelerated the decomposition of peat at the GDS, reducing the capacity and stability of the carbon sink.

The Oslerian legacy in the Southern states

In the pages of The Southern Medical Journal, in 1919, William Osler’s colleague Lewellys Barker published a piece entitled “Osler and the South.” Using glowing terms but with startling inaccuracy, Barker described Osler’s relationship with the South and Southerners. Essentially, the brief communication was a happy birthday letter. If Osler had any thoughts on the Civil War, Reconstruction, or the Southern agrarian mindset, he never wrote them down, and a paucity of published information is available to support Barker’s comments. Even though William Osler lived in Baltimore when he worked at Johns Hopkins, he was never particularly fond of that city. He rarely traveled further south. When Osler departed Baltimore for the Regius Professorship in England in 1905, H. L. Mencken eventually published an exquisitely written and fond remembrance of Osler. On several occasions when Osler did venture south, he left a momentous literary or academic footprint. He gave his famous address, “The Fevers of the South,” at the American Medical Association meeting in Atlanta in 1896. From this oratory comes the iconic and oft-quoted line: “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” On another excursion, he and two colleagues traveled to the Dismal Swamp, in Old Comfort Point, Virginia. Osler’s fascination with Thomas Moore’s poem “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” inspired the outing. During their lunch break, Osler composed a whimsical tale, intended for his son Revere, about the swamp. Osler wrote the story on blank pages in the back of a copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy. That particular volume came to rest in a library in Christ Church and, when discovered, the “added contents” were quite a philological mystery until a letter, written by T. B. Futcher, describing the visit to the swamp, illuminated the activities of that outing. Despite Osler’s limited travels in the South, he left an Oslerian legacy there.

Estimation and Uncertainty of Recent Carbon Accumulation and Vertical Accretion in Drained and Undrained Forested Peatlands of the Southeastern USA

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to determine how drainage impacts carbon densities and recent rates (past 50 years) of vertical accretion and carbon accumulation in southeastern forested peatlands. We compared these parameters in drained maple‐gum (MAPL), Atlantic white cedar (CDR), and pocosin (POC) communities in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (GDS) of Virginia/North Carolina and in an intact (undrained) CDR swamp in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge (AR) of North Carolina. Peat cores were analyzed for bulk density, percent organic carbon, and 137Cs and 210Pb. An uncertainty analysis of both 137Cs and 210Pb approaches was used to constrain error at least partially related to mobility of both radioisotopes. GDS peats had lower porosities (89.6% (SD = 1.71) versus 95.3% (0.18)) and higher carbon densities (0.082 (0.021) versus 0.037 (0.009) g C cm−3) than AR. Vertical accretion rates (0.10–0.56 cm yr−1) were used to estimate a time period of ~84–362 years for reestablishment of peat lost during the 2011 Lateral West fire at the GDS. Carbon accumulation rates ranged from 51 to 389 g C m−2 yr−1 for all sites. In the drained (GDS) versus intact (AR) CDR sites, carbon accumulation rates were similar with 137Cs (87GDS versus 92AR g C m−2 yr−1) and somewhat less at the GDS than AR as determined with 210Pb (111GDS versus 159AR g C m−2 yr−1). Heightened productivity and high polyphenol content of peat may be responsible for similar rates of carbon accumulation in both drained and intact CDR peatlands.

『드레드: 거대하고 우울한 늪지의 이야기』에 나타난 백인 온정주의 : 에드워드 클레이튼의 성장을 중심으로

This article argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp shows the author’s self-reflection as a white advocate of abolitionism. This article focuses on the character of Edward Clayton, who has much in common with the author, thus making it possible for her to critically review her own status as she speaks for African American slaves. In the novel, there are two court trials involving African Americans. Clayton reveals white paternalism, and emphasizes the weakness of black people instead of crediting their bravery or integrity that they deserve. Clayton feels justified in merely “taking care of them,” instead of focusing on speaking of their anger and cause for resistance. In describing Clayton in these events, Stowe displays a critical distance between him and herself. Clayton’s transformation from a good white man to a real abolitionist begins when he meets with Dred, the slave insurrectionist, and runaway slaves in the swamp. After his experience in the swamp, he begins to embrace African American people as equals which becomes his realistic alternative to Dred’s insurrection and Milly’s pacifism. In the end, he can be said to have overcome and abandoned his white paternalistic tendencies, just as Stowe herself has.

A carbon balance model for the great dismal swamp ecosystem

BackgroundCarbon storage potential has become an important consideration for land management and planning in the United States. The ability to assess ecosystem carbon balance can help land managers understand the benefits and tradeoffs between different management strategies. This paper demonstrates an application of the Land Use and Carbon Scenario Simulator (LUCAS) model developed for local-scale land management at the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. We estimate the net ecosystem carbon balance by considering past ecosystem disturbances resulting from storm damage, fire, and land management actions including hydrologic inundation, vegetation clearing, and replanting.ResultsWe modeled the annual ecosystem carbon stock and flow rates for the 30-year historic time period of 1985–2015, using age-structured forest growth curves and known data for disturbance events and management activities. The 30-year total net ecosystem production was estimated to be a net sink of 0.97 Tg C. When a hurricane and six historic fire events were considered in the simulation, the Great Dismal Swamp became a net source of 0.89 Tg C. The cumulative above and below-ground carbon loss estimated from the South One and Lateral West fire events totaled 1.70 Tg C, while management activities removed an additional 0.01 Tg C. The carbon loss in below-ground biomass alone totaled 1.38 Tg C, with the balance (0.31 Tg C) coming from above-ground biomass and detritus.ConclusionsNatural disturbances substantially impact net ecosystem carbon balance in the Great Dismal Swamp. Through alternative management actions such as re-wetting, below-ground biomass loss may have been avoided, resulting in the added carbon storage capacity of 1.38 Tg. Based on two model assumptions used to simulate the peat system, (a burn scar totaling 70 cm in depth, and the soil carbon accumulation rate of 0.36 t C/ha−1/year−1 for Atlantic white cedar), the total soil carbon loss from the South One and Lateral West fires would take approximately 1740 years to re-amass. Due to the impractical time horizon this presents for land managers, this particular loss is considered permanent. Going forward, the baseline carbon stock and flow parameters presented here will be used as reference conditions to model future scenarios of land management and disturbance.

Aboveground Forest Biomass and Litter Production Patterns in Atlantic White Cedar Swamps of Differing Hydroperiods

Ecosystems dominated by Chamaecyparis thyoides (Atlantic White Cedar) are critically endangered due to hydrologic alterations associated with ditching, logging, development, and agricultural conversion. Few studies have related structural and functional characteristics of this plant community to water tables, yet hydrologic management options may be critical to establish a peat-based seed refugium and allow Atlantic White Cedar self-maintenance in this ecosystem. In this study, we assessed aboveground forest biomass, litter production, and depth to water table at a mature (60–70 y) and an intermediate (20–35 y) age-class stand in two national wildlife refuges, Alligator River (AR) and Great Dismal Swamp (DS) in North Carolina. We calculated forest biomass from morphometric data gathered within randomized study plots. We made monthly litter collections at each study plot from November 1998 to April 2000; litter was sorted by species and type for the first 12 months. Wells installed at each study plot recorded water-table levels, which were at or near the surface at AR but >30 cm below the soil surface at DS throughout the study. Although Atlantic White Cedar was a dominant species at all sites, community structure differed between refuges. Total aboveground biomass was similar among age classes; however, Atlantic White Cedar stem density was greater and mean diameter at breast height was lower at AR. Mean annual litter production was higher at AR sites for each age class despite a persistently high water table. We conclude that the rates of primary production associated with high water tables at AR represent favorable conditions for Atlantic White Cedar self-maintenance.

In the Lowlands Low: Swamping About the South

In the Lowlands LowSwamping About the South Bland Simpson (bio) and with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson In Memory of Brooke Meanley, Jack Temple Kirby, and James Kilgo Beneath the canopy we paused at the edge of what appeared to be not water but a pale green floor; through it rose a thin forest of tupelo gum, red maple, pond cypress, and pine . . . As I glanced over my shoulder at the green surface beneath me, I felt suddenly that I was suspended above the primal generative slime itself, composite of earth, air, fire and water . . . —James Kilgo, Deep Enough for Ivorybills Click for larger view View full resolution Creek flowing into the White Oak River above Haywood Landing, North Carolina, March 2014. [End Page 78] gaither’s lagoon & the great dismal Gaither’s Lagoon, a small, dark backwater off the Pasquotank River in northeastern North Carolina, was less than two blocks from my childhood home in Elizabeth City, and my boyhood friends and I were always roaming its seemingly enormous vine-shrouded reaches at will. Hurricane Hazel had laid a big gum over into the crotch of an oak, and someone had nailed steps onto it and built a platform up there, and we climbed it and sat in this crow’s nest and looked down on our swampy world. Always there seemed to be more birds and turtles and bullfrogs at-large than snakes, and we felt little if any fear in that place. The vast Great Dismal Swamp lay not far north of town, and our river, the Pasquotank, wound down out of the Swamp. On field trips up to Norfolk, our metropolis, we stared out of the school bus windows at the Great Dismal’s unbroken forest during the twenty-two-mile swampside transit up the Canal Bank, the old towpath and swamp highway that paralleled the Dismal Swamp Canal. At every turn in this country, there was a branch, a slough, a poquoson, a swamp, and most of us sensed that we did not simply live near swamp—we belonged to it. Yet we were often warned against the swamps—of their desperado hideouts, of runaway slave camps of old, of moonshiners who had no use for company, and of ghost lights that could lure you in and lose you. And how no one, not even the law, would come in looking for you. My father and I once did get lost (though we never used that word—if anything, we might have said turned around) for a spell in a branch of the southern Dismal one wintry Sunday afternoon, but we made it out all right before sunset. We marched any number of times into our family’s swamp woods on Big Flatty Creek in southern Pasquotank County. I recall very well the first time when we studied the big pines and the cypress-fringed branches one late fall afternoon, and how we made it out of there too. We roamed the sound-side woods of Kitty Hawk and Nags Head on the Outer Banks, maritime forests, wooded dunes with ponds and swampy bogs set close in between them, green with duckweed in summer, and these dense, wild places always accepted us readily and then let us go without threat. But we were mindful: I learned to step lightly, and carefully to test wet ground that may be solid, or that might be the quaggy top of a deep pit of sandy, silty mud, deeper than I was tall. I was twenty-three before I ever spent a night in such a place. In September of 1972, John Foley and I camped for a week at the Feeder Ditch spillway, a quarter mile east of fabled Lake Drummond at the heart of the Great Dismal, tens of thousands of wilderness acres memorialized in the nineteenth century by poets Thomas Moore and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and by novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose preacher Dred lived and led his people there. We got to know Old Frank, as the Corps of Engineers spillway operators called him, a self-proclaimed swamp rat without portfolio, a slow-moving sexagenarian [End Page 79] who spent his days projecting around...

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s other novel – Dred on the London stage

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two major anti-slavery novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred: a tale of the great dismal swamp, were both adapted, with varying degrees of success, for the English stage. The former was a major and fairly long-lasting ‘hit’; the latter, while briefly popular, was by no means as long-lived a success. And, while Uncle Tom is still familiar to, if not widely read by, the novel-reading public, Dred is virtually unknown, except to students and scholars. This article examines some of the ways that these novels were adapted for the nineteenth-century stage, what this reveals about the way that dramatists interpreted their fundamental messages and how, despite Dred’s more politically radical orientation, the dramatisations largely blunted this through a resort to the stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy.

The Records of Early English Drama: Wales, ed. David N. Klausner.

IN a period when the public thinks that the humanities, particularly the literary humanities, have wandered off into the dismal swamp of critical theory and delight in speculations of and about airy nothings, it is a bracing and hopeful thing that a volume such as this in a project such as this should exist. The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project was founded in 1975 and has, since its first volume in 1979 (York), published twenty-four collections of the dramatic records of regions (typically counties) of England, and now with the volume under review, Wales has been included. The project’s aim is ‘to locate, transcribe, and edit all surviving documentary evidence of drama, minstrelsy, and public ceremonial in England before 1642.’ This is about as far from critical theory as one could possibly get. It is undoubtedly the most important scholarly project in this field to be launched and carried forward with care and appropriate speed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The march of the red REED volumes (the series is uniformly bound in bright red cloth) along the shelves of reference collections and those of many scholars is a quite joyous event.

Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (review)

Reviewed by: Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida Ken Whalen Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida Gary R. Mormino . University of Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2005. 457 pp., photographs, maps. $34.95 hardcover (ISBN 0-8130-2818-3) In Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, Gary Mormino, Duckwall Professor of History at the University of South Florida, charts the historic and spatial relationships between the forces of human culture—including imaginative geographies—and the unique environment of the state of Florida. His temporal boundaries mainly encompass the twentieth century, though forays into earlier times are found only when they add sequential depth to his modern map. Mormino's book, which took eight years to write, is now the center of an invaluable set of monographs produced for the Florida History and Culture Series initiated in 1997 through the University of Florida Press. The series includes critically acclaimed non-fiction books, each one focusing on a particular topic ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans, Feminism to Florida Crackers. Land of Sunshine is a social history, vibrant with facts but never bedazzling. Mormino is perfectly charitable with twists of perspectives such as in the use of statistical analogies and similes that do not divert us from the intellectual destination of his book. His navigational technique makes for smooth sailing through the oceans of texts he has diligently sniggled from below the surface and combined into a thorough account of people and landscapes of modern Florida. The nine substantive chapters present a collage of themes that have been distilled from a deep knowledge of Florida history and geography, and refined into appealing phases that speak to those most prominent economic, political, social, technological and natural forces that have most changed Florida and its inhabitants. Each chapter contains a number of tables and maps that simply show the locations of places mentioned. The first chapter, "Look Away Dixie-land," proposes that new technology such as air conditioning, New Deal entitlements including Social Security, and the availability of relatively cheap land touched-off Florida's demographic 'Big Bang' of the 1950s. During the next five decades the state's population increased from around 2 million to 16 million people. Migrants came from all over the Western Hemisphere (but mostly from the Northeast and Midwest United States) to reshape Florida's cultural landscape into a mosaic of multicultural features that blend with con-urbanization, edge and walled cities, and shopping malls to create a new "urban megastate." Many parts of Florida now seem eons away from the cultural traditions and landscapes of vernacular "Dixie" to which it once aptly belonged. Chapter 2, "Florida on the Installment Plan," focuses specifically on the marketing of land during Florida's ". . . third great land boom" which galvanized its population explosion. The availability of low interest credit increased the number of potential buyers of land and homes in the state. But before installment plans could be [End Page 325] drawn, imaginative geographies of Florida, particularly those of northern retirees, would need to be refashioned, from dismal swamp to land of leisurely fun under the sun. Businessmen, inventors, bankers and celebrities who acquired large tracks of land for development created and promoted this new identity. Several short biographies of landscape coalesce into a brief who's who of Florida's residential development, both successes and failures. Similar biographies in the next chapter help tell the story of the rise of modern Florida tourism. Moreover, the section radiates with accounts of old and new venues of entertainment and leisure and their ethnic, historic and regional significance. The Florida vacation soon became a defining signature of American life just like owning a house and car. Along with federal, state and local government policies, and new technology and transportation infrastructure, came the transformation of leisure into consumption in post-industrial capitalism. This "signature" carved into social and natural landscape of Florida has had both positive and negative impacts. Sadly, Florida's ecosystems have suffered mostly the latter. "Vacation," writes Mormino (p. 119), "is the antithesis of conservation." The "gray wave" is the focus of chapter 4. Mormino explains in detail...

DRED: A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

Book Review| January 01 2006 DRED: A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP DRED: A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMPStowe, Harriet Beecher; Levine, Robert S. Aaron Shackelford Aaron Shackelford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Resources for American Literary Study (2006) 31 (1): 349–351. https://doi.org/10.2307/26367051 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Aaron Shackelford; DRED: A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP. Resources for American Literary Study 1 January 2006; 31 (1): 349–351. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26367051 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 AMS Press, Inc.2007AMS Press, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A statue, a fiery furnace and a dismal swamp: a reflection on some issues in biblical hermeneutics

A discussion of the history of interpretation of three passages in Daniel (3:17; 2:31-45; 9:24-27) is used as the basis for some initial reflections on how it is possible to accept a ‘hermeneutic of unfolding’ which involves the participation of the reader while maintaining that a text has an inherent meaning. It is suggested that a distinction can be made between this ‘meaning’ and the differing ‘significances’ that a text may have for particular readers. Michael Polanyi’s ‘post-critical’ philosophy of knowledge, which involves the personal participation of the knower in the act of understanding, is outlined briefly. It is argued that his concepts of ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘indwelling’ and ‘imaginative sympathy’, and the roles they play in gaining knowledge, provide support for the approach to a hermeneutic of unfolding proposed earlier in the paper.

Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred

MARIA KARAFILIS Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred Today ... it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the "making of geography" more than the "making of history" that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies Is the system of slavery, as set forth in the American slave code, right! Is it so desirable, that you will directly establish it over broad regions, where, till now, you have solemnly forbidden it to enter? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred By the mid nineteenth century, the persistence of the domestic slave trade, along with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, suggested that the abolition of slavery was not imminent. In fact, the "peculiar institution" was expanding , and threatened to turn recently acquired western territories into slave states. As emancipation seemed increasingly precarious, and the possibility offreedom for slaves in the United States less secure, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her lesser-known but more militant anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). In Dred, Stowe depicts several potential sites where African Americans could participate in democratic communities and notions of racial hierarchy could be challenged. These potential sites include a reformed Southern plantation , a settlement offree and fugitive blacks in Canada, and a maroon community in the Great Dismal Swamp. The first two locales end up replicating the repressive systems ofhierarchy that undergird the racist, dominant order and thus are specious alternatives of democtatic pracArizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 24Maria Karaflis tice, while the latter, the swamp, is the primary arena that holds out the possibility of meaningful sociopolitical transformation. These reconceptualizations of sites of democratic action serve to contrast the poetic and idealized notion of "America" with the geopolitical territory and official state apparatus of the "United States." By suggesting an alternative space—not the American sacred space of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers—Stowe challenges the concept of America as the otdained and divinely favored locus of freedom and equality and theteby tetertitotializes the national imaginaty. The geopolitical territoty of the United States is dissociated from the ideal manifestation of democracy, and the authot locates the latter somewhere else. This "somewhere else" is not in an experimental collectivity or commune in the United States (like Brook Fatm, for example), but in the "un-American" borderland space of the swamp. That location suggests both the degree to which racist ideologies have petmeated the American system, symbolized by the geopolitical territoty, and saturated the "land"—both the territory and its métonymie reference to the people and state—with anti-black sentiment. It also suggests a disturbing , concomitant need to physically remove oneself from U.S. soil in order to develop an alternative consensus and sociopolitical system. Examining Dred in terms of spatialization and the loci of democratic ideals and practices brings to the fore such questions as, "What can be a space offreedom for blacks in America?" and "Where can such marginalized populations achieve the liberty and freedom promised to all men by the Declatation of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?" These questions concerning space and freedom were particularly pressing and politically charged when Stowe was writing Dred in the 1850s, as the nation simultaneously debated extending slavery into the new territories and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which separated the region into two distinct states and allowed for popular sovereignty to determine whether the states would be slave or free territories. Intranational borders, then, and the "line" at which slavery stops were hotly contested, and with profound social, economic, and political consequences. Dred represents an intervention into the debate concerning spaces of "freedom " and spaces of slavery in the United States, and it is an argument against extending slavery into the new territories. Charles Sumner, Stowe's close friend and Congress member, recog- Spaces of Democracy25 nized the value of Stowe's new book in combating the Kansas-Nebraska Act and arresting the spread of slavery. In a letter to her in the early 1850s Sumner wrote, "1 am rejoiced to learn, from your...

"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. The Matrix of Transformation: 1. To the lake of the dismal swamp: Porte Crayon's inward journey 2. The elusive Eden: the mid-Victorian response to the swamp 3. Mid-Victorian cultural values and the amoral landscape: the swamp image in the work of William Gilmore Simms and Harriet Beecher Stowe Part II. The Phenomenology of Disintegration: 4. Frederic Church in the tropics 5. The penetration of the jungle 6. American nature writing in the mid-Victorian period: from pilgrimage to quest 7. A loss of vision: the cultural inheritance 8. A loss of vision: the challenge of the image 9. Infection and imagination: the swamp and the atmospheric analogy Part III. The Circuit of Death and Regeneration: 10. Immersion and regeneration: Emerson and Thoreau 8. The identification with desert places: Martin Johnson Heade and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman 12. Religion, science, and nature: Sidney Lanier and Lafcadio Hearn Conclusion: Katherine Anne Porter's Jungle and the Modernist idiom Appendix Notes Selected Bibliography Index.

ROOT PRODUCTION IN FOUR COMMUNITIES IN THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

A sequential coring approach was used to measure root biomass and production over 1 year in four different communities within the Great Dismal Swamp. A second method, an implanted bag technique, was also used to measure root production, and values were generally lower using this technique. On all sites, fine roots were the most dynamic root component. Both biomass (1,887 g/m2) and production (354–989 g m 2 yr‐1) were highest on the mixed hardwood site, the least flooded site, and second highest on the cedar site, the site with the longest duration of soil saturation (1,033 g/m2 and 274–366 g m‐2 yr‐1). The maple‐gum (696 g/m2 and 59–91 g m‐2 yr‐1) and cypress (824 g/m2 and 68–308 g m‐2 yr‐1) sites had similarly low amounts of biomass and rates of production. Environmental parameters that influenced production include frequency and duration of flooding, and soil type. Peaks in belowground production were observed on the most productive sites (mixed hardwood and cedar) in summer and late fall‐winter; the other two sites exhibited little seasonal variability. The least flooded stand appears to allocate a greater percentage of net primary production belowground than the more extensively flooded stands. The ratio of above‐ and belowground allocation appears to change in response to a flooding gradient. This has major implications for ecosystem functions as carbon allocation patterns determine the array of litter types generated (leaves vs. roots) which affect decomposition rates and nutrient availability.