Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West

A common theme of western American art--from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O'Keeffe--is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this handsome book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies. Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured Indians caught up in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time; when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences--through large edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions--significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region's landscape in the twentieth century. Publication of this book will coincide with an exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opening at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.

Arts & Photography

Sandweiss, Martha A.

Cronon, William

Anderson, Nancy K.

Prown, Professor Jules David

Dippie, Professor Brian W.

Schoelwer, Ms. Susan Prendergast

Lamar, Professor Howard R.

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

This handsome book presents a major reinterpretation of western American art of the past three centuries-from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O`Keeffe-reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies.

Argues that the American frontier and city developed together by focusing on Chicago and tracing its roots from Native American habitation to its transformation by white settlement and development

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

History

Americas

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Essays examine the significance of the frontier in American history, the bases of a western identity, and the themes that connect the twentieth-century West to its more distant past

Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past

Miles, George

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." ―Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize

W.W.Norton&Company

Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize Changes in the Land offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, Cronon constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how the land and the people influenced one another, and how that complex web of relationships shaped New England's communities.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England

Hill and Wang

The book that launched environmental history now updated. 
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize
In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

Business & Money

Economics

From the turn of the century until his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright produced an almost uninterrupted stream of projects that redefined the American architectural vision. The most comprehensive summary and appraisal of Wright's achievement ever assembled, with nearly 500 illustrations, including 190 in color, this volume presents an impressive array of works: single family houses that provided images and models for generations of suburban buildings across the United States, community solutions to housing for Depression America, and an astonishing progression of landmark commercial and institutional structures. In these pages appear Wright's most spectacular commissions--among them Fallingwater, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel--but also a retrospective selection of other projects from all periods of his enormously productive career. Photographs of actual buildings and of models, plans, and sketches, as well as reproductions of the architect's masterful drawings, many previously unpublished, are all included.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect

FRAMPTON, Kenneth

Wright, Gwendolyn

Reed, Peter

Alofskin, Anthony

Biographies & Memoirs

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Tantor Audio

In a lifetime of exploration, writing, and passionate political activism, John Muir became America's most eloquent spokesman for the mystery and majesty of the wilderness. A crucial figure in the creation of our national parks system and a far-seeing prophet of environmental awareness who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, he was also a master of natural description who evoked with unique power and intimacy the untrammeled landscapes of the American West. The Library of America's Nature Writings collects his most significant and best-loved works in a single volume, including: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894) and Stickeen (1909). Rounding out the volume is a rich selection of essays—including "Yosemite Glaciers," "God's First Temples," "Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta," "The American Forests," and the late appeal "Save the Redwoods"—highlighting various aspects of his career: his exploration of the Grand Canyon and of what became Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, his successful crusades to preserve the wilderness, his early walking tour to Florida, and the Alaska journey of 1879. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

John Muir : Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; Essays (Library of America)

MUIR, JOHN

Sports & Outdoors

Library of America

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