The Making of Yosemite

The Making of Yosemite

Author: Jen A. Huntley

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2014-01-31

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0700619674

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Leader of the first tourist expedition into Yosemite in 1855, James Mason Hutchings became a tireless promoter of the valley-and of himself. Seeking to create an alternative to California's Gold Rush social chaos, Hutchings whetted the public enthusiasm for this unspoiled land by mass producing a lithograph of Yosemite Falls, while his Hutchings' California Magazine beat the drum for tourism. But because of his later legal imbroglios over the park, Hutchings was effectively written out of its history, and today he is largely viewed as an opportunist who made a career out of exploiting Yosemite. Now Jen Huntley removes the tarnish from Hutchings's image. She portrays him instead as a "connector" who brought artists to Yosemite and Yosemite to Americans, and uses his career as a lens through which to view the contests and debates surrounding the creation of Yosemite, and, by extension, America's emerging ethic of land conservation. Blending environmental and cultural history, she tracks Hutchings's professional trajectory amidst significant changes in nineteenth-century America, from technological advances in printing to the growth of tourism, from the birth of modern environmental movements to battles over public lands. Huntley uses Hutchings's legal battles with the government over ownership of land in the Yosemite Valley to analyze larger battles over public land management and national identity. She also explores the role of urban San Francisco in designating Yosemite a public park, shows how the Civil War transformed Yosemite from a regional icon to a national symbol of post-war redemption, and takes a closer look at Hutchings's relationship with John Muir. Making Yosemite sheds light on the role of power, class dynamics, and the late-century ideal of individualism in the shaping of modern America's sacred landscapes. Hutchings emerges here as a visionary communicator who cleverly tapped into midcentury Americans' attitudes toward spectacular scenery to create a sense of place-based identity in the American Far West. Huntley's revisionist approach rediscovers Hutchings as a key player in the histories of American media, tourism, and environmentalism, and suggests new terrain for scholars to consider in writing the histories of our national parks, conservation, and land policy.


Scenes of Wonder & Curiosity

Scenes of Wonder & Curiosity

Author: Ted Orland

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13:

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Ted Orlando is a seasoned and dedicated photographer who started out as Ansel Adams's assistant. Orlando was a member of the inner sanctum of photographers who transformed photography, he saw it all. And yet the book has more than this, it is the record of a life dedicated to a medium, of a young man struggling to become an artist in his own right and be a success. Orland's images, beautifully reproduced in this volume are arresting in their allusions, impressive in their breadth, and rich in their visual vocabulary. It also contains Orland's letters and a running diary of sorts that takes the reader into the holy temple of those fervent years when the anointed gathered along the California coast. -- Publisher description.


Sketches from the Life of PEG-LEG Smith

Sketches from the Life of PEG-LEG Smith

Author: James M. Hutchings

Publisher:

Published: 2004-08

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780971633476

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In 1855, Englishman James Mason Hutchings contrived theidea of publishing a magazine to popularize California, which hecalled Hutchings' Illustrated California. The enterprising carpenter,gold miner, publisher and promoter introduced the magazineto attract immigrants, as well as to make money. Thomas AlmondAyres, a California Gold Rush-era artist, most famous for drawingthe first rendering of Yosemite Valley, was hired. The monthlymagazine was published in San Francisco from July 1856 to June1861, for a total of five volumes. Hutchings' Illustrated playedan important role in popularizing California in general as wellas popularizing a number of well-known legendary stories of theWest, including the Pony Express, Grizzly Adams, Peg-leg Smithand Snowshoe Thompson.


Assembling California

Assembling California

Author: John McPhee

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0374706026

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At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.


Pioneer Photographers of the Far West

Pioneer Photographers of the Far West

Author: Peter E. Palmquist

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 9780804738835

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This extraordinarily comprehensive, well-documented, biographical dictionary of some 1,500 photographers (and workers engaged in photographically related pursuits) active in western North America before 1865 is enriched by some 250 illustrations. Far from being simply a reference tool, the book provides a rich trove of fascinating narratives that cover both the professional and personal lives of a colorful cast of characters.