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Named one of “the year’s best gardening books” by The Spectator (UK, Nov. 2014) The 1890s saw a revolution in advertising. Cheap paper, faster printing, rural mail delivery, railroad shipping, and chromolithography combined to pave the way for the first modern, mass-produced catalogs. The most prominent of these, reaching American households by the thousands, were seed and nursery catalogs with beautiful pictures of middle-class homes surrounded by sprawling lawns, exotic plants, and the latest garden accessories—in other words, the quintessential English-style garden. America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.
“A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” (Kirkus Reviews), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips—before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps. The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming—sans seatbelts!—to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks. Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative” (New York Newsday) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day” (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio. An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips” (Publishers Weekly), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.
With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.
Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the Little Ice Age in Britain, Middle English romances provide a fascinating window into the worldviews of popular vernacular literature (and its audiences) at the close of the Middle Ages. Andrew M. Richmond shows how literary conventions of romances shaped and were in turn influenced by contemporary perspectives on the natural world. These popular texts also reveal widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of human actions and climate change. The natural world was a constant presence in the writing, thoughts, and lives of the audiences and authors of medieval English romance – and these close readings reveal that our environmental concerns go back further in our history and culture than we think.
A marriage of convenience leads to a life of passion and purpose. A shared vision transforms the American landscape forever. New York, 1858: Mary, a young widow with three children, agrees to marry her brother-in-law Frederick Law Olmsted, who is acting on his late brother's deathbed plea to "not let Mary suffer." But she craves more than a marriage of convenience and sets out to win her husband's love. Beginning with Central Park in New York City, Mary joins Fred on his quest to create a 'beating green heart' in the center of every urban space. Over the next 40 years, Fred is inspired to create dozens of city parks, private estates and public spaces with Mary at his side. Based upon real people and true events, this is the story of Mary's journey and personal growth and the challenges inherent in loving a brilliant and ambitious man.
Photographs and essays express "the way the American landscape has been forged by various cultures in the past and what the possibilities are for its future design."--Jacket.
In this natural history classic, the author takes the reader on field trips to landscapes across America, both domesticated and wild. She shows how to read the stories written in the land, interpreting the clues laid down by history, culture, and natural forces. A renowned teacher, writer and conservationist in her native Midwest, Watts studied with Henry Cowles, the pioneering American ecologist. She was the first to explain his theories of plant succesion to the general public. Her graceful, witty essays, with charming illustrations by the author, are still relevant and engaging today, as she invites us to see the world around us with fresh eyes.
American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present. The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.
The Hudson Valley's role in the mid-1800s as the birthplace of American landscape architecture is explored through the romantically designed grounds of the valley's historic estates and the works of “the father of American landscape design,” Hudson Valley native Andrew Jackson Downing. Landscape gardening is a hidden but unequaled historic resource along the Hudson River, exhibiting some of the most significant designed 19th-century landscapes in America. Landscape Gardens on the Hudson is the first comprehensive study of the development of these landscapes and the important role they played in the cultural underpinnings of the young United States—a legacy that continues today with the design of America's urban parks and nearly every rural or suburban home. This garden design work in the 19th century stands at the center of historic events that decisively shaped the concept of scenic beauty in America and became a core value of the American dream. It was undeniably indigenous, because it reflected America's “genius of the place”—the genius loci of the Hudson River Valley. Fueled by sympathetic political, religious and nationalistic principles, America's cultural aspirations joined with the nation's physical assets, the landscape, to achieve a distinctive artistic expression. Most famously, this aesthetic found expression in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School artists. Less well known is how this aesthetic determined the way Americans transformed the natural world around them.The sense of America as “Nature's Nation” was a central theme for romanticism in the early republic. In America, wild nature was an essential component of the “genius of the place.” America was seen as special, distinguished by its wilderness condition. “In the beginning,” wrote the English philosopher John Locke, “all the world was America.” This romantic sensibility expressed itself along the Hudson in the “Picturesque” landscape design approach, wherein art is hidden so that a fully natural and vernacular expression could prevail. These thoughts were exemplified at Washington Irving's Sunnyside and other cottage-style properties, and it reached a magnificent aesthetic crescendo with Olana, the unique and famed landscape creation by renowned Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church. Olana has been rightly called by a recent commentator “one of the most perfectly realized Romantic landscape gardens in the world.” First, the predominantly English history of landscape gardening is traced as a prelude to landscape gardening in America. Then, the evolution of landscape design in New York's long colonial period is described at such historic sites as Philipse Manor (Yonkers), Livingston Manor (Clermont), Van Cortlandt Manor (Croton), and Schuyler House (Albany). After the Revolutionary War, with the blossoming of the Romantic period, landscape gardening achieved a regional culmination that was unique in America. A dozen of the finest examples on the Hudson are presented. The history and design of such well-known historic properties as David Hosack's Hyde Park (today's Vanderbilt Mansion), Irving's Sunnyside, the Livingstons' Montgomery Place, Samuel F. B. Morse's Locust Grove, and Olana are interpreted not as historic houses alone, but as landscape garden compositions. The historical commentary of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) is included at each site visited. Downing was a Hudson Valley native and America's leading landscape gardener in the antebellum years. His protégé, Calvert Vaux, coined the term “landscape architect” and later teamed with Frederick Olmsted on the design of Central Park (1858), a triumph of romantic landscape design and the inspiration for nearly every American public park created in the subsequent 150 years.The text is illustrated with over 140 period and contemporary images, including plans, photographs, bird's-eye views, paintings and engravings, many in color.