Description
Book SynopsisThe Hudson River Valley was the first iconic American landscape. Beginning as early as the 1820s, artists and writers found new ways of thinking about the human relationship with the natural world along the Hudson. Here, amid the most dramatic river and mountain scenery in the eastern United States, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper created a distinctly American literature, grounded in folklore and history, that contributed to the emergence of a sense of place in the valley. Painters, led by Thomas Cole, founded the Hudson River School, widely recognized as the first truly national style of art. As the century advanced and as landscape and history became increasingly intertwined in the national consciousness, an aesthetic identity took shape in the region through literature, art, memory, and folkloreeven gardens and domestic architecture. In Sanctified Landscape, David Schuyler recounts this story of America's idealization of the Hudson Valley during the nineteenth and ear
Trade Review
In his capable and congenial history, David Schuyler, a humanities and American studies professor at Franklin and Marshall College, reminds us that the dance of change and permanence itself has been a constant throughout Catskill and Hudson Valley history.
-- John Rowen * Kaatskill Life *
Over the past two decades or so, David Schuyler has established himself as one of the nation's preeminent students of American landscape and planning history. Whether in dealing with the transformative nature of the forces that created urban landscapes or assessments of the fathers of landscape architecture in America, namely Frederick Law Olmstead and Andrew Jackson Downing, Schuyler’s work has fashioned for us a deeper understanding and appreciation for the events, personalities, and forces that have made our environment what it is.... This is a fine and handsome book with lusciously reproduced paintings,wonderful reproductions of drawings and plans, and strong photographs. The quality reflects what university presses do better than most. In an era when many university presses are facing closure or are being downsized, a book of this nature is argument enough to embrace university presses for what they are: national treasures. And this book is a book about a national treasure itself, the mighty Hudson River. Thanks to David Schuyler and the Cornell University Press!
* Environmental History *
Schuyler has fashioned an absorbing account of the cultural milieu in which the Hudson Valley, a landscape of discrete villages, towns, and estates, was transformed into an iconic American region.... He adroitly foregrounds an abundant selection of contemporary sources testifying to the passionate sense of place these men exhibited in their professional and personal lives, as well as the influence most exerted, at least for a time, on the nation's aesthetic taste. Linking the Hudson Valley to early efforts of historic preservation and environmentalism, Schuyler commendably avoids the usual good-versus-evil narrative. The author's own sense of place is evident in illustrations and maps.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 The Tourists' River: Experiencing the Hudson Valley
2 The Artist's River: Thomas Cole
3 The Writers’ River: Washington Irving and N. P. Willis
4 The River in a Garden: A. J. Downing
5 Change and the Search for Continuity at Midcentury
6 Elegy for the Hudson River School: Jervis McEntee
7 The Naturalist’s River: John Burroughs
8 A River in Time: Preserving Landscape, Celebrating History
Conclusion
