Sixty Miles from Contentment is a revitalization of a pulsating American scene in the nineteenth-century. Drawing on the work of travel writers from America's own East Coast and from fourteen other countries, it offers a witty and irreverent look at the wild Midwest in its heyday.
The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn’t just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place—revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement. The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.
Ruth Edgerton Douglass's diary recounts her winter journey from Detroit to Wisconsin and then her life through autumn and into the following winter on Isle Royale, where her husband had been hired to supervise a mining operation. She shares something of the contrast between the city life she had known and the backwoods existence she came to lead with her husband.
This fascinating cultural history, studded with vivid details bringing the experience of Victorian-era travel alive, explores the beginnings of urban tourism, and sets the phenomenon within a larger cultural transformation that encompassed fundamental changes in urban life and national identity.".
The first anthology to assemble the writings of the groundbreaking art historian, critic, and curator Marcia Tucker. These influential, hard-to-obtain texts —many of which have never before been published—by Marcia Tucker, founding director of New York's New Museum, showcase her lifelong commitment to pushing the boundaries of curatorial practice and writing while rethinking inherited structures of power within and outside the museum. The volume brings together the only comprehensive bibliography of Tucker’s writing and highlights her critical attention to art’s relationship to broader culture and politics. The book is divided into three sections: monographic texts on a selection of the visionary artists whom Tucker championed, among them Bruce Nauman, Joan Mitchell, Richard Tuttle, and Andres Serrano; exhibition essays from some of the formative group shows she organized, such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (1969) and Bad Girls (1994), which expanded the canons of curating and art history; and other critical works, including lectures, that interrogated museum practice, inequities of the art world, and institutional responsibility. These texts attest to Tucker’s tireless pursuit of questions related to difference, marginalization, access, and ethics, illuminating her significant impact on contemporary art discourse in her own time and demonstrating her lasting contributions to the field.
Alfred Davenport—parents gone, elder siblings married with families—followed a dream to see Oregon in May 1844. Visiting California in 1846, Davenport dropped into the conflict between settlers and the Mexican government. Joining California settlers, Davenport fought in the Bear Flag Revolt and with John Charles Fremont’s California Mounted Battalion. Year 1849 found Alfred caught up in California’s gold rush. His mining career ended with Davenport resigning as manager of Fremont’s famous Pine Tree Mine to join General Fremont in Missouri as a cavalry captain in the Body Guard. Year 1862 found Captain Davenport serving as a special messenger carrying orders from General Fremont to field generals in western Virginia. The army’s Quartermaster Department assigned Davenport as supervisor of military hospital construction in the Civil War’s Mississippi valleys and for duty in the customhouse in Union-occupied New Orleans. Postwar, Davenport became a land speculator in a newly opened land in Kansas.
Winner of the Western Writers of America 2014 Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction, Contemporary Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70. Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today. Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.
The most beloved American comedic actor of the nineteenth century, Joseph Jefferson made his name as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. In this book, a compelling blend of biography and theatrical and cultural history, Benjamin McArthur chronicles Jefferson's remarkable career and offers a lively and original account of the heroic age of the American theatre. Joe Jefferson's entire life was spent on the stage, from the age of Jackson to the dawn of motion pictures. He extensively toured the United States as well as Australia and Great Britain. An ever-successful career (including acclaim as painter and memoirist) put him in the company of the great actors, artists, and writers of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, John Singer Sargent, and William Dean Howells. This book rescues a brilliant figure and places him, appropriately enough, on center stage of a pivotal time for American theatre. McArthur explores the personalities of the period, the changing theatrical styles and their audiences, the touring life, and the wide and varied culture of theatre. Through the life of Jefferson, McArthur is able to illuminate an era.
In Manifest Destinations, J. Philip Gruen examines the ways in which tourists experienced Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco between 1869 and 1893, a period of rapid urbanization and accelerated modernity. Gruen pays particular attention to the contrast between the way these cities were promoted and the way visitors actually experienced them.