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Little was known about America's most famous natural wonder until 1869, when John Wesley Powell traveled the full length of the Grand Canyon by boat. He returned each year; in 1873 he introduced it to artist Thomas Moran, whose brazenly colored, grand scale portrayals of the canyon stunned the public. In 1908, Moran's work prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to declare the Grand Canyon a national monument; by 1919, Congress had established Grand Canyon National Park.As the Santa Fe Railway opened up the Southwest, in 1892 the company began hiring artists to paint scenes of the Grand Canyon, including Moran, W. R. Leigh, and Louis Akin. Today, artists are still capturing the splendor of the Grand Canyon: Ed Mell, Clark Hulings, Wilson Hurley, Frank Mason, P. A. Nisbet, Bruce Aiken, and Earl Carpenter are among the contemporary artists represented in The Majesty of the Grand Canyon.
Describes an exhibit at the National Gallery, the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, and the Seattle Art Museum
Illustrated with 120 color and black-and-white reproductions showcasing works by George Catlin, Worthington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, Georgia O'Keefe and others, Plain Pictures is the first book to address representations of the midwestern prairie as a genre distinct from American western art. In a wide-ranging narrative, Kinsey argues that images of the grassland, far from being plain, offer a paradox of their own: the significance of the subject is equalled only by the struggle to express it.
Representations of first contact—the first meetings of European explorers and Native Americans—have always had a central place in our nation’s historical and visual record. They have also had a key role in shaping and interpreting that record. In Framing First Contact author Kate Elliott looks at paintings by artists from George Catlin to Charles M. Russell and explores what first contact images tell us about the process of constructing national myths—and how those myths acquired different meanings at different points in our nation’s history. First contact images, with their focus on beginnings rather than conclusive action or determined outcomes, might depict historical events in ...
In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the ’transcendental state’. Historical and indeed contemporary space exploration is, despite some recent notable exceptions, worthy of more attention across the social sciences and humanities. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.
As restoration ecologists and amateur prairie preservationists recover the land, this book seeks to recover the prairie of the American imagination - past, present, and future."--BOOK JACKET.
By analyzing ways in which indigenous cultures described the American Southwest, David Teague persuasively argues against the destructive approach that Americans currently take to the region. Included are Native American legends and Spanish and Hispanic literature. As he traces ideas about the desert, Teague shows how literature and art represent the Southwest as a place to be sustained rather than transformed. 14 illustrations.
Here, for the first time in paperback, is a fascinating daily record of Ferdinand Hayden?s historic 1871 scientific expedition through Utah, Idaho, and Montana Territories to the Yellowstone Basin. The expedition?s findings quickly led Congress to establish Yellowstone as the world?s first national park. In addition to its scientific discoveries, the expedition is famous for producing the earliest on-site images of Yellowstone, by its photographer, William Henry Jackson, and its guest artist, Thomas Moran. ø Marlene Deahl Merrill has woven together a compelling daily narrative from the field writings of three expedition members: unpublished journals kept by mineralogist Albert Peale and geologist George Allen, periodic reports by Peale to his hometown newspaper, and letters from Hayden to his friend and mentor Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Enriching this narrative are Jackson?s photographs of camp scenes and landscapes; rare panoramic drawings by the party?s topographical artist, Henry Elliott; maps; an introduction; and extensive annotations.
Although some have attributed the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition primarily to gunpowder and gumption, historian William R. Swagerty demonstrates in this two-volume set that adopting Indian ways of procuring, processing, and transporting food and gear was crucial to the survival of the Corps of Discovery. The Indianization of Lewis and Clark retraces the well-known trail of America’s most famous explorers as a journey into the heart of Native America—a case study of successful material adaptation and cultural borrowing. Beginning with a broad examination of regional demographics and folkways, Swagerty describes the cultural baggage and material preferences the expedition carrie...