Explores the intersections of print, writing, and media in early American literary culturesPrint Technologies and the Emergence of American Literary Cultures traces the complex dynamics that shaped literary production in North America from pre-Columbian times through the early nineteenth century. Oliver Scheiding’s in-depth study demonstrates how literary cultures emerged not from isolated acts of authorship, but through a network of human and non-human me...

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...

Worlding America explores the circulation of short narratives in the early Americas through a combination of neglected primary materials and scholarly commentary. Building on recent reconsiderations of American literature in light of transnational and hemispheric approaches, it follows the migration of stories from various backgrounds and demonstrates how forms and themes developed in a new literary market that spanned the Atlantic world.While short narratives prior to 180...

Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s em...

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.

“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...