Wendy Hall

Hugh Davis

Gerard Hutchings

Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essentially the story of the Microcosm hypermedia research and development project that started in the late 1980's and from which has emerged a philosophy that re-examines the whole concept of hypermedia and its role in the evolution of multimedia information systems. The book presents the complete story of Microcosm to date. It sets the development of Microcosm in the context of the history of the subject from which it evolved, as well as the developments in the wider world of technology over the last two decades including personal computing, high-speed communications, and the growth of the Internet. These all lead us towards a world of global integrated information environments: the publishing revolution of the 20th century, in principle making vast amounts of information available to anybody anywhere in the world. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach explains the role that open hypermedia systems and link services will play in the integrated information environments of the future. It considers issues such as authoring, legacy systems and data integrity issues, and looks beyond the simple hypertext model provided in the World Wide Web and other systems today to the world of intelligent information processing agents that will help us deal with the problems of information overload and maintenance. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach will be of interest to all those who are involved in designing, implementing and maintaining hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web by setting the groundwork for producing a system that is both easy to use and easy to maintain. Rethinking Hypermedia: The Microcosm Approach is essential reading for anyone involved in the provision of online information.

The Microcosm Approach

Rethinking Hypermedia

Wildly productive during his short life, James Agee (1909-1955) is today perhaps best remembered as a novelist-his posthumously published A Death in the Family won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958-but he was also a poet, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, book reviewer, and movie critic. In The Making of James Agee, Hugh Davis takes a comprehensive look at Agee's career, showing the interrelatedness of his concerns as a writer. A full view of Agee's oeuvre, Davis argues, illuminates its deeply political nature as well as a debt to various sources, particularly European surrealism, that have been little noted by previous Agee scholars. Davis challenges the view of Agee that has persisted since his death-that he is best understood primarily as a romantic individualist at odds with convention and the literary mainstream-and argues that this myth was largely constructed by friends and associates who were so immersed in the tenets of modernism that they distorted Agee's work (and aesthetic intent) in an attempt to purify it in modernist terms. In revealing a writer of far greater complexity than the Agee myth allows, Davis explores, for example, the leftist poetry that Agee wrote in the 1930s, which was almost completely suppressed by his editors. He also throws a fresh light on Agee's collaboration with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and reevaluates A Death of in the Family in light of recent scholarship that has produced an almost entirely new version of the novel, one much closer to Agee's original intentions. A much-needed corrective to the many misconceptions about Agee, Davis's study is a provocative and lucidly written work that is certain to spark new dialogues about one of the most fascinating figures in twentieth-century American literature.

The Making of James Agee

Historians have focused almost entirely on the attempt by southern African Americans to attain equal rights during Reconstruction. However, the northern states also witnessed a significant period of struggle during these years. Northern blacks vigorously protested laws establishing inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals. In "We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less," Hugh Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools. Davis connects the local and the national; he joins the specifics of campaigns in places such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and San Francisco with the work of the National Equal Rights League and its successor, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons. The narrative moves forward from their launching of the equal rights movement in 1864 to the "end" of Reconstruction in the North two decades later. The struggle to gain male suffrage rights was the centerpiece of the movement’s agenda in the 1860s, while the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, northern blacks devoted considerable attention to assessing their place within the Republican Party and determining how they could most effectively employ the franchise to protect the rights of all citizens.

The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction

"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less"

De jure uniformitatis ecclesiasticæ: or, Three books, of the rights belonging to an uniformity in churches. In which the chief things, of the lawes of nature, and nations, and of the Divine Law, concerning the consistency of the ecclesiastical estate with the civil, are unfolded

Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools.

Hugh Davis

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