Mount Vernon Love Story

Mount Vernon Love Story PDF Author: Mary Higgins Clark
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471103617
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Always a lover of history, Mary Higgins Clark wrote this extensively researched biographical novel and titled it Aspire to the Heavens, after the motto of George Washington's mother. Published in 1969, the book was more recently discovered by a Washington family descendant and reissued as Mount Vernon Love Story. Dispelling the widespread belief that although George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, he reserved his true love for Sally Carey Fairfax, his best friend's wife, Mary Higgins Clark describes the Washington marriage as one full of tenderness and passion, as a bond between two people who shared their lives -- even the bitter hardship of a winter in Valley Forge -- in every way. In this author's skilled hands, the history, the love, and the man come fully and dramatically alive.

Mount Vernon Love Story

Mount Vernon Love Story PDF Author: Mary Higgins Clark
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471103617
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Always a lover of history, Mary Higgins Clark wrote this extensively researched biographical novel and titled it Aspire to the Heavens, after the motto of George Washington's mother. Published in 1969, the book was more recently discovered by a Washington family descendant and reissued as Mount Vernon Love Story. Dispelling the widespread belief that although George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, he reserved his true love for Sally Carey Fairfax, his best friend's wife, Mary Higgins Clark describes the Washington marriage as one full of tenderness and passion, as a bond between two people who shared their lives -- even the bitter hardship of a winter in Valley Forge -- in every way. In this author's skilled hands, the history, the love, and the man come fully and dramatically alive.

Mount Vernon and Its Associations

Mount Vernon and Its Associations PDF Author: Benson John Lossing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art museums
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This book offers a more personal glimpse at the life of George Washington, as portrayed through the narrative of his home at Mount Vernon. Important house pieces, locations, and so forth are also discussed in their historical importance, and also meaning in the life of Washington.

"The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret"

Author: Mary V. Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813941844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"American historians began producing in-depth studies of slavery and slave life shortly after World War II, but it was not until the early 1980s that the country's museums took the first tentative steps to interpret those same controversial topics. Perhaps because of the tremendous amount of primary material related to George Washington, almost no one looked into the lives of Mount Vernon's enslaved population. Incorporating the results of detailed digging, of both the archaeological and archival varieties, the number of chapters grew as further questions arose. While a few scholars outside Mount Vernon turned their attention to Washington's changing ideas about slavery, they largely overlooked the daily lives of those who were enslaved on the estate, a subject about which visitors expressed a desire to know more. The resulting book makes use of a wide range of sources, including letters, financial ledgers, work reports, travel diaries kept by visitors to Mount Vernon, the reminiscences of family members, former slaves, and neighbors, reports by archaeologists, and surviving artifacts to flesh out the lives of a people who left few written records, but made up 90 percent of the estate's population. The book begins with a look at George and Martha Washington as slaveowners, before turning to various facets of slave life ranging from work, to family life, housing, foodways, private enterprise, and resistance. Along the way, readers will see a relationship between Washington's military career and his style of plantation management, learn of the many ways slaves rebelled against their condition, and get to know many of the enslaved people who made Mount Vernon their home"--

Stewards of Memory

Stewards of Memory PDF Author: Carol Borchert Cadou
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813941539
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Mount Vernon, despite its importance as the estate of George Washington, is subject to the same threats of time as any property and has required considerable resources and organization to endure as a historic site and house. This book provides a window into the broad scope of preservation work undertaken at Mount Vernon over the course of more than 160 years and places this work within the context of America’s regional and national preservation efforts. It was at Mount Vernon, beginning with efforts in 1853, that the American tradition of historic preservation truly took hold. As the nation’s oldest historic house museum, Mount Vernon offers a unique opportunity to chronicle preservation challenges and successes over time as well as to forecast those of the future. Stewards of Memory features essays by senior scholars who helped define American historic preservation in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Carl R. Lounsbury, George W. McDaniel, and Carter L. Hudgins. Their contributions—complemented by those of Scott E. Casper, Lydia Mattice Brandt, and Mount Vernon’s own preservation scholars—offer insights into the changing nature of the field. The multifaceted story told here will be invaluable to students of historic preservation, historic site professionals, specialists in the preservation field, and any reader with an interest in American historic preservation and Mount Vernon. Support provided by the David Bruce Smith Book Fund and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.

Experiencing Mount Vernon

Experiencing Mount Vernon PDF Author: Jean Butenhoff Lee
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
George Washington, acutely aware of the accomplishments and potential of the American Revolution, used his Mount Vernon estate both to preserve the memory of events that had created a new nation and to forward his keen vision of what that nation might become. During the 1780s and 1790s, an era when neither public museums nor a national library existed, visitors to Mount Vernon viewed John Trumbull's iconic image of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Houdon's famous bust of the countryís preeminent hero, and Washington's voluminous wartime correspondence. More important, they listened as the Washingtons recalled the remarkable events that had forged independence and the unique American experiment in representative government. At Mount Vernon, too, Washington and his guests discussed how best to secure the success and well-being of the United States. Here was a place to contemplate "what the nation, at its best, might be." Following George and Martha Washington's deaths, the estate passed to four successive heirs, the last of whom deeded it to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association in 1860. While still in private hands, the property nonetheless attracted thousands of visitors each year, most of whom arrived after a fifteen-mile overland trek from Washington, D.C. With the establishment of regular steamboat access in the 1850s, the numbers swelled to ten thousand annually. The public claimed Mount Vernon as its own. In the words of a nineteenth-century Washington family member, "the Nation shares it with us." In a remarkable display of civic religion that testified to the siteís enormous hold on the public imagination, Americans pronounced Mount Vernon sacred ground and made it the nationís most important site of revolutionary memory and inspiration. The sacred ground was, nonetheless, contested ground: visitors criticized the heirs' management of the property; northerners abhorred the persistence of slavery at the estate. As pilgrims contemplated the highest ideals of the Revolution at Washington's home and tomb, they often found their own society wanting. Amid escalating sectional strife in the 1850s, some argued that if Mount Vernon could be saved for the nation, the nation might be preserved from ruin. In letters and journals, newspaper and magazine articles, and public speeches, visitors recorded, often in detail and with intense emotion, their varied reactions to the site. Experiencing Mount Vernon presents the most informative of these accounts, as well as selected documents from the Washington owners (beginning with Washington himself, who in 1784 prematurely wrote Lafayette that, at his beloved home, he had "retired from all public employments"). Numerous maps, contemporary images, and annotations complement the texts. This book constitutes the only eyewitness chronicle we have of the Washington estate's ascent to the status of national shrine, and it offers the closest possible evidence of Mount Vernonís singular role in helping forge American national identity.

The General in the Garden

The General in the Garden PDF Author: Adam T. Erby
Publisher: Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, Library
ISBN: 9780931917486
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Designing the beautiful: General Washington's landscape improvements, 1784-1787 / Adam T. Erby -- George Washington's gardens: under the watchful eye of the Mount Vernon Ladies / J. Dean Norton -- "Laid out in squares, and boxed with great precission": uncovering George Washington's upper garden / Esther C. White -- Gardens et groves: a landscape guide / Adam T. Erby -- The views: bowling green, upper garden, greenhouse and slave quarter, lower garden, botanical garden, outbuildings, the lost deer park.

Visitors' Guide to Mount Vernon ...

Visitors' Guide to Mount Vernon ... PDF Author: Elizabeth Bryant Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mount Vernon
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description


The Property of the Nation

The Property of the Nation PDF Author: Matthew R. Costello
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700633367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
George Washington was an affluent slave owner who believed that republicanism and social hierarchy were vital to the young country’s survival. And yet, he remains largely free of the “elitist” label affixed to his contemporaries, as Washington evolved in public memory during the nineteenth century into a man of the common people, the father of democracy. This memory, we learn in The Property of the Nation, was a deliberately constructed image, shaped and reshaped over time, generally in service of one cause or another. Matthew R. Costello traces this process through the story of Washington’s tomb, whose history and popularity reflect the building of a memory of America’s first president—of, by, and for the American people. Washington’s resting place at his beloved Mount Vernon estate was at times as contested as his iconic image; and in Costello’s telling, the many attempts to move the first president’s bodily remains offer greater insight to the issue of memory and hero worship in early America. While describing the efforts of politicians, business owners, artists, and storytellers to define, influence, and profit from the memory of Washington at Mount Vernon, this book’s main focus is the memory-making process that took place among American citizens. As public access to the tomb increased over time, more and more ordinary Americans were drawn to Mount Vernon, and their participation in this nationalistic ritual helped further democratize Washington in the popular imagination. Shifting our attention from official days of commemoration and publicly orchestrated events to spontaneous visits by citizens, Costello’s book clearly demonstrates in compelling detail how the memory of George Washington slowly but surely became The Property of the Nation.

Lives Bound Together

Lives Bound Together PDF Author: Jessie MacLeod
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780931917097
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
At the time of George Washington's death in 1799, more than 300 enslaved men, women, and children lived on his Mount Vernon plantation. Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon, published to accompany a 2016-2018 exhibition, explores this important example of eighteenth-century slavery through brief biographies of 19 enslaved individuals, 10 essays, and 130 illustrations (including paintings, prints, objects, buildings, landscapes, documents, charts, maps, and conjectural silhouettes that suggest the presence of the enslaved). The text illuminates three key themes: first, the lives, families, and experiences of the enslaved people of Mount Vernon; second, Washington's changing views on slavery, culminating in his pioneering action to free his slaves per the terms of his will; and third, the extent to which his public career and his family's lives were inextricably entwined with the labor of Mount Vernon's enslaved people. The biographies represent a range of experiences, including men and women; natives of Africa and the Virginia Tidewater; field-workers, artisans, and domestic laborers; some who escaped and some who were recaptured and sold as punishment; some who died in slavery and some who became free. Compiled by Mount Vernon Associate Curator Jessie MacLeod, these biographies draw upon documentary references, from Washington's diaries, letters, account books, invoices, farm managers' reports, visitor descriptions, and public records, supplemented by archaeology and oral histories. The essays provide a broader context for understanding the individual life stories, focusing on George Washington's changing attitude toward slavery; the resistance actions of the enslaved; the nineteenth-century history of slavery at Mount Vernon and images created by nineteenth-century artists; the kinds of evidence found in documents, databases, archaeology, and landscapes; and personal reflections by members of families descended from individuals enslaved at Mount Vernon. Harvard law professor and historian Annette Gordon Reed contributes the introduction; an appendix presents a timeline linking key events in the lives of people enslaved at Mount Vernon with George Washington's public and private actions relating to slavery as well as landmark events of national history. Detailed reference notes and suggestions for further readings complete the work.

The Home of Washington and Its Associations

The Home of Washington and Its Associations PDF Author: Benson John Lossing
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mount Vernon (Va. : Estate)
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description