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In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large--twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide--had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for eleven generations. Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres. Still, its hidden vault proved to be full of revelations and treasures, including the 1666 charter for the land, and correspondence from Thomas Jefferson. Most notable was the short and steep flight of steps the family had called the "slave staircase," which would provide clues to the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Alongside a team of archaeologists, Griswold began a dig that would uncover a landscape bursting with stories. Based on years of archival and field research, as well as voyages to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe, "The Manor" is at once an investigation into forgotten lives and a sweeping drama that captures our history in all its richness and suffering.
The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island's Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races. Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North's first plantations. There, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family's economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor's plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community. -- Book jacket.
NYC tour guides and authors James and Michelle Nevius explore the lives of 20 iconic New Yorkers—from Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to Alexander Hamilton, park architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—and use them to guide the reader through four centuries of the city’s story. Beginning with the oldest standing building in the city, , a 1652 farmhouse in Brooklyn, and journeying all the way to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, the book follows in the footsteps of these iconic New Yorkers. The authors tell the stories of everyone from slave traders and long-forgotten politicians to the movers and shakers of Gilded Age society and the Greenwich Village folk scene. One part history and one part personal narrative, Footprints in New York creates a different way of looking at the past, exploring new connections and forgotten chapters in the story of America’s greatest metropolis. Visit www.footprintsinny.com for more.
A leading African-American historian of race in America exposes the uncomfortable truths about race, slavery and the American academy, revealing that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained it.
"In addition, Cothran provides profiles of prominent gardeners, horticulturists, nurserymen, and writers who, in the decades preceding the American Civil War, were instrumental in shaping the horticultural and gardening legacy of the South."--BOOK JACKET.
New scholarship provides insights into the archaeology and cultural history of African American life from a collection of sites in the Mid-Atlantic
“I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise is like an exquisite string of pearls: the perfect balance of elegance, style, design, and beauty. This book is inspiring, spirited, and totally absorbing.” —Diane von Furstenberg The story of Bunny Mellon, the great landscape and interior designer, becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century. Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare, once-in-a-generation sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work—the White House Rose Garden, designed during the presidency of John F. Kennedy—demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. Later, her understated landscape design for the Kennedy grave site at Arlington National Cemetery changed the face of American public memorials. Mellon was a famously private person, and many of her greatest achievements remained concealed from public view. Her rarely seen gardens and domestic interiors at eight different properties on three continents became legends and models. At Oak Spring Farm in Virginia, the bibliographic riches of her Garden Library were twinned with the expansive flowering gardens lying below the Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed building. At her home on Nantucket, she pruned back the landscape to reveal the elemental forms of nature. Mellon also ranked as one of the great art collectors of her era, encouraging her husband Paul to use his family’s vast wealth to acquire hundreds of nineteenth-century French paintings, many of which were donated to the National Gallery of Art. Her own tastes ranged from Mark Rothko to Richard Diebenkorn—in quantity. In I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold—who knew Mellon personally—delves into her subject’s closely guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman-as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards’s short-lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that, over the years, included Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and I. M. Pei. How Mellon’s character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments—private and public—is the real subject of this biography.
This book narrates and analyzes the southern tours that Booker T. Washington and his associates undertook in 1908-1912, relating them to Washington's racial philosophy and its impact on the various parts of black society.