The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional colle...

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about landscape in art.

**WINNER OF THE 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS BOOK CIRCLE AWARD IN NONFICTIONNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE GLOBE AND MAIL • GRANTA • THE NEW YORKER • CBC • VULTUREA TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC • KIRKUS REVIEWS • PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • BARNES AND NOBLEThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wak...

“American Eden moves luminously through landscapes of history, literature, biography, and design theory. . . . fusing sharp-edged analysis and graceful American prose.” —Kevin Starr, author of Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge“Informative and absolutely engrossing.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi's DomeGarden designer and historian Wade Graham offers a unique vision of the story of America in this riveting exploration of the nation’s gardens a...

Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue. “When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston’s palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest...

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its cr...

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first centuryThe Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides rea...

Typecasting chronicles the emergence of the "science of first impression" and reveals how the work of its creators—early social scientists—continues to shape how we see the world and to inform our most fundamental and unconscious judgments of beauty, humanity, and degeneracy. In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen & Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as hist...

Housing and Dwelling collects the best in recent scholarly and philosophical writings that bear upon the history of domestic architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lane combines exemplary readings that focus on and examine the issues involved in the study of domestic architecture, taken from an innovative and informed combination of philosophy, history, social science, art, literature and architectural writings. Uniquely, the readings underline the point of view o...

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, h...

"By playing with notions of collecting and cataloging, this anthology offers a range of investigations into detritus and forgotten ephemera."—Colin Dickey, coeditor of The Morbid Anatomy AnthologyThe modern age is no stranger to the cabinet of curiosities, the freak show, or a drawer full of odds and ends. These collections of oddities engagingly work against the rationality and order of the conventional archive found in a university, a ...

Why architecture matters—and how to make it matter moreFit is a book about architecture and society that seeks to fundamentally change how architects and the public think about the task of design. Distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes argues that buildings, landscapes, and cities should be designed to fit: fit the purpose, fit the place, fit future possibilities. Fit replaces old paradigms, such as form follows function, and less is more, by r...