Author: T. J. Jackson Lears
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780914660187
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
What do Buffalo Bill and Winslow Homer tell us about Victorian America and the idea of the virgin landscape? How do John Ford's films continue to subvert the traditions of Frederic Remington? What do natural history murals tell us about how Victorian America saw its destiny?Lively and accessible, this volume of six inter-disciplinary essays draws on museology, cultural geography, gender studies and literary history to explore the latest thinking about 19th century American landscape in the broadest sense. In a witty, lucid and wide-ranging introduction, T.J. Jackson Lears sets the stage for the six intriguing essays that follow: Richard White on transcendental landscapes, Sarah Burns on Winslow Homer and the natural woman, Michele Bogart on the neglected work of Charles R. Knight, diorama painter to the American Museum of Natural History, Elizabeth Johns on 19th century city-dwellers and day excursions, Stephen Pyne on how the Canyon became Grand, and Richard Slotkin on visual narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford.
Author: Karen A. Rader
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607983X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.
Author: Rachel McLean Sailor
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826354238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
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.
Author: Elizabeth L. Lee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150134689X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
In 1901, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens proclaimed in a letter to Will Low, Health-is the thing! Though recently diagnosed with intestinal cancer, Saint-Gaudens was revitalized by recreational sports, having realized midcareer there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio. The Medicine of Art puts such moments center stage in order to consider the role of health and illness in the way art was produced and consumed. Not merely beautiful or entertaining objects, works by Gilded-Age artists such as John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are shown to function as balm for the ill, providing relief from physical suffering and pain. Art did so by blunting the edges of contagious disease through a process of visual translation. In painting, for instance, hacking coughs, bloody sputum, and bodily enervation were recast as signs of spiritual elevation and refinement for the tuberculous, who were shown with a pale, chalky pallor that signalled rarefied beauty rather than an alarming indication of death. Works of art thus redirected the experience of illness in an era prior to the life-saving discoveries that would soon become hallmarks of modern medical science to offer an alternate therapy. The first study to address the place of organic disease-cancer, tuberculosis, syphilis-in the life and work of Gilded-Age artists, this book looks at how well-known works of art were marked by disease and argues that art itself functioned in medicinal terms for artists and viewers in the late 19th century.
Author: T. J. Jackson Lears
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780914660187
Category : Art, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
What do Buffalo Bill and Winslow Homer tell us about Victorian America and the idea of the virgin landscape? How do John Ford's films continue to subvert the traditions of Frederic Remington? What do natural history murals tell us about how Victorian America saw its destiny?Lively and accessible, this volume of six inter-disciplinary essays draws on museology, cultural geography, gender studies and literary history to explore the latest thinking about 19th century American landscape in the broadest sense. In a witty, lucid and wide-ranging introduction, T.J. Jackson Lears sets the stage for the six intriguing essays that follow: Richard White on transcendental landscapes, Sarah Burns on Winslow Homer and the natural woman, Michele Bogart on the neglected work of Charles R. Knight, diorama painter to the American Museum of Natural History, Elizabeth Johns on 19th century city-dwellers and day excursions, Stephen Pyne on how the Canyon became Grand, and Richard Slotkin on visual narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford.
Author: Aaron Sachs
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189052
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 710
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Book Description
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia--not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's--and his own--tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.
Author: Carla Yanni
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568984728
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Yanni (art history, Rutgers U.) examines the relationship between architecture and science in the 19th century by considering the physical placement and display of natural artifacts in Victorian natural history museums. She begins by discussing the problem of classification, the social history of collecting, as well as architectural competitions an
Author: Frank H. Goodyear III
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300214553
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
A revelatory exploration of Winslow Homer’s engagement with photography, shedding new light on his celebrated paintings and works on paper One of the greatest American painters of the 19th century, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) also maintained a deep engagement with photography throughout his career. Focusing on the important, yet often-overlooked, role that photography played in Homer’s art, this volume exposes Homer’s own experiments with the camera (he first bought one in 1882). It also explores how the medium of photography and the larger visual economy influenced his work as a painter, watercolorist, and printmaker at a moment when new print technologies inundated the public with images. Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.
Author: Paul Sutter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506
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Book Description
This reader gathers fifteen of the most important essays written in the field of southern environmental history over the past decade. Ideal for course use, the volume provides a convenient entrée into the recent literature on the region as it indicates the variety of directions in which the field is growing. As coeditor Paul S. Sutter writes in his introduction, “recent trends in environmental historiography--a renewed emphasis on agricultural landscapes and their hybridity, attention to the social and racial histories of environmental thought and practice, and connections between health and the environment among them--have made the South newly attractive terrain. This volume suggests, then, that southern environmental history has not only arrived but also that it may prove an important space for the growth of the larger environmental history enterprise.” The writings, which range in setting from the Texas plains to the Carolina Lowcountry, address a multiplicity of topics, such as husbandry practices in the Chesapeake colonies and the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. The contributors’ varied disciplinary perspectives--including agricultural history, geography, the history of science, the history of technology, military history, colonial American history, urban and regional planning history, and ethnohistory--also point to the field’s vitality. Conveying the breadth, diversity, and liveliness of this maturing area of study,Environmental History and the American Southaffirms the critical importance of human-environmental interactions to the history and culture of the region. Contributors: Virginia DeJohn Anderson William Boyd Lisa Brady Joshua Blu Buhs Judith Carney James Taylor Carson Craig E. Colten S. Max Edelson Jack Temple Kirby Ralph H. Lutts Eileen Maura McGurty Ted Steinberg Mart Stewart Claire Strom Paul Sutter Harry Watson Albert G. Way
Author: U. C. Knoepflmacher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520032293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540
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Book Description
