Well-known theatre and circus historian William L. Slout here collects together 29 first-hand accounts of 19th- and early 20th-century popular amusements, including summer resorts, watering places, agricultural fairs, World's Fairs, the circus, vaudeville, theatre, and amusement parks. Complete with index, introduction, and contemporaneous illustrations.
Political Animals offers a unique study and perspective on the relationship between politics and the art found in American zoos and aquariums. Jesse Donahue and Erik Trump examine the ways that zoos and aquariums have successfully served as sculptural gardens for the masses and have incorporated art and architecture that convey political messages about both the patrons and the animals. This book demonstrates how art has been used for a range of economic and political purposes including providing jobs, a medium to reach out to minority interest groups, a fundraising tool, and a surrogate for the animals themselves. Donahue and Trump skillfully analyze and compare zoos to other areas of public art to highlight the calculated strategies on the part of the zoos that have incorporated a range of artistic styles for different audiences. Incorporating photographs of zoo and aquarium art from around the country, Political Animals is an exciting and captivating text for the mind and eye.
The latest title in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks series, Theaters offers a richly illustrated history of a revered cultural artifact and a technological challenge, following its progression from the eighteenth-century opera house to the modern movie multiplex.
Following her successful Literary Guide to Washington, DC, which Library Journal called "the perfect accompaniment for a literature-inspired vacation in the US capital," Kim Roberts returns with a comprehensive anthology of poems by both well-known and overlooked poets working and living in the capital from the city’s founding in 1800 to 1930. Roberts expertly presents the work of 132 poets, including poems by celebrated DC writers such as Francis Scott Key, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ambrose Bierce, Henry Adams, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as the work of lesser-known poets—especially women, writers of color, and working-class writers. A significant number of the poems are by writers who were born enslaved, such as Fanny Jackson Coppin, T. Thomas Fortune, and John Sella Martin. The book is arranged thematically, representing the poetic work happening in our nation’s capital from its founding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, and the beginnings of literary modernism. The city has always been home to prominent poets—including presidents and congressmen, lawyers and Supreme Court judges, foreign diplomats, US poets laureate, professors, and inventors—as well as writers from across the country who came to Washington as correspondents. A broad range of voices is represented in this incomparable volume.
A celebration of America's workers and the nation they built. Narratives tell the stories, over time, of wheat growers and sharecroppers, mill girls and housemaids, gold miners and railway porters, farmwives and cowboys, newsboys and stenographers.
