Views And Viewmakers Of Urban America

Union list catalog of the lithographic views of cities and towns made during the 19th century.

Though tourism now plays a recognized role in historical research and regional studies, the study of popular touristic images remains sidelined by chronological histories and objective statistics. Further, Arizona remains underexplored as an early twentieth-century tourism destination when compared with nearby California and New Mexico. With the notable exception of the Grand Canyon, little has been written about tourism in the early days of Arizona’s statehood. Mapping Wonderlands fills part of this gap in existing regional studies by looking at early popular pictorial maps of Arizona. These cartographic representations of the state utilize formal mapmaking conventions to create a place-based state history. They introduce illustrations, unique naming conventions, and written narratives to create carefully visualized landscapes that emphasize the touristic aspects of Arizona. Analyzing the visual culture of tourism in illuminating detail, this book documents how Arizona came to be identified as an appealing tourism destination. Providing a historically situated analysis, Dori Griffin draws on samples from a comprehensive collection of materials generated to promote tourism during Arizona’s first half-century of statehood. She investigates the relationship between natural and constructed landscapes, visual culture, and narratives of place. Featuring sixty-six examples of these aesthetically appealing maps, the book details how such maps offered tourists and other users a cohesive and storied image of the state. Using historical documentation and rhetorical analysis, this book combines visual design and historical narrative to reveal how early-twentieth-century mapmakers and map users collaborated to imagine Arizona as a tourist’s paradise.

"A collection of essays examining the history of nineteenth-century commercial lithography in Philadelphia. Analyzes the social, economic, and technological changes in the local trade from 1828 to 1878"--Provided by publisher.

Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation. Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

"The authors write authoritatively and crisply . . . . How to use maps in teaching is spelled out carefully, but the authors also manage to sketch in the background of American mapping so the book is both a manual and a history. Commentaries are sprinkled with stimulating new ideas, for instance on how to use bird's-eye views and country atlases in the classroom, and there are didactic discussions on maps showing the walking city and the impact of the street car. "An extraordinarily wide range of maps is depicted, which makes for good browsing, pondering and close study. . . . This is a very good, highly attractive, and worthwhile book; it will have great impact on the use of old (and new!) maps in teaching. As well, this is a tantalizing survey of mapping the United States and will whet the appetites of students and encourage them to learn more about maps and their origins."—John Warketin, Cartographica

America's westward expansion involved more than pushing the frontier across the Mississippi toward the Pacific; it also consisted of urbanizing undeveloped regions of the colonial states. In 1810, New York's future governor DeWitt Clinton marveled that the "rage for erecting villages is a perfect mania." The development of Rochester and Syracuse illuminates the national experience of internal economic and cultural colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. Architectural historian Diane Shaw examines the ways in which these new cities were shaped by a variety of constituents—founders, merchants, politicians, and settlers—as opportunities to extend the commercial and social benefits of the market economy and a merchant culture to America's interior. At the same time, she analyzes how these priorities resulted in a new approach to urban planning. According to Shaw, city founders and residents deliberately arranged urban space into three segmented districts—commercial, industrial, and civic—to promote a self-fulfilling vision of a profitable and urbane city. Shaw uncovers a distinctly new model of urbanization that challenges previous paradigms of the physical and social construction of nineteenth-century cities. Within two generations, the new cities of Rochester and Syracuse were sorted at multiple scales, including not only the functional definition of districts, but also the refinement of building types and styles, the stratification of building interiors by floor, and even the coding of public space by class, gender, and race. Shaw's groundbreaking model of early nineteenth-century urban design and spatial culture is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the American city.

For well over a century, New York has been a microcosm of the art and craft of American printmaking. Until 1825, printmaking in America was almost entirely an artisan's craft. Then, with the arrival of lithography, the realization arose that printmaking could also be a fine art. The essays published in this collection contribute to the body of scholarship by identifying important but hitherto insufficiently studied aspects of the graphic arts and treating them authoritatively. Their subjects concern prints in New York State, whose great metropolitan city was, after 1825, the acknowledged center of nearly everything important in the graphic arts in the U.S. The history of American prints from 1825 on is enormously rich, yet until the 1970s it was the least studied and understood aspect of the history of art in North America. It is a history more deeply rooted in popular culture and more closely tied, for a long time, to the world of commerce than the other arts. The usually small-scale, sometimes ephemeral, and often highly subtle (or highly unsubtle) nature of prints makes it easy to overlook them. The collection of essays included here were originally presented at the Twelfth Annual North American Print Conference, held in 1981 in Syracuse, New York. Locally organized, these conferences have been held during the last decade throughout the U.S. and Canada to further the study of the history of the pictorial graphic arts in North America. Contributors include several leading historians of the graphic arts of nineteenth-century America. Their chapters bring to life and flesh out figures who were previously little more than names, establish facts that correct long-held erroneous assumptions, introduce many prints of exceptional interest that have remained out of the public view for generations, and provide a rich, new context for many familiar images.