You can try going to Settings > Reading > Front Page Displays As: and select "Latest Posts"

If that doesn't work it's because the theme was not intended to be used in that manner. Hopefully that does what you're looking for.

Basically I don't want to use the Theme Options categories, but rather want the home page to display the most recent posts.

On the home page, you get articles listed by category with the animation. I just want the home page to list each article by most recent post like a the stock blog page on the default wordpress format.

I'm not sure I follow... there is no Slider on the Daily Press theme. Can you clarify?

I imagine this is simple, but I wanted to turn off the home page slider on the homepage of Daily Press and just get the default blog page. How would I do that?