William Woodward (1859-1939) was a force in New Orleans and the art world, and his legacy endures. In this first compilation of examples of Woodward's work spanning his career, essayists offer unique perspectives on the artist and his art.Woodward was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He started the School of Art and organized the Department of Architecture at Tulane University, and he taught evening art classes to citizens of ...

From the Potomac to the Gulf, artists were creating in the South even before it was recognized as a region. The South has contributed to America’s cultural heritage with works as diverse as Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s architectural plans for the nation’s Capitol, the wares of the Newcomb Pottery, and Richard Clague’s tonalist Louisiana bayou scenes. This comprehensive volume shows how, through the decades and centuries, the art of the South expanded from mimetic portraiture to sophisticated r...

Buried within the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exists an astonishing group of historical relics from the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present day, many of which have never been on display. Donated to the museum by generations of souvenir collectors, these ordinary objects of extraordinary circumstance all have amazing tales to tell about their roles in American history. Souvenir Nation presents fifty of the museum's most eccentric item...

The great majority of the South's plantation homes have been destroyed over time, and many have long been forgotten. In Lost Plantations of the South, Marc R. Matrana weaves together photographs, diaries and letters, architectural renderings, and other rare documents to tell the story of sixty of these vanquished estates and the people who once called them home.From plantations that were destroyed by natural disaster such as Alabama's Forks of Cypress, to those that were i...

The Garden District of New Orleans has enthralled residents and visitors alike since it arose in the 1830's with its stately white-columned Greek Revival mansions and double-galleried Italianate houses decorated with lacy cast iron. Photographer West Freeman evokes the romance of this elegant neighborhood with lovely images of private homes, dazzling gardens, and public structures. Author Jim Fraiser vividly details the historical significance and architectural styles of more than a hundre...

Folk art is one of the American South’s most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South’s complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collectin...

A presidential portraitist, a two-headed calf and a national landmark that inspires creativity--extraordinary tales abound in Connecticut from Hartford to Bethlehem, from New Haven to Bristol and all points in between. Learn about "The Age of Reptiles"--a 110-foot-long, 16-foot-high mural skillfully crafted by painter Rudolph Zallinger at the Peabody Museum in New Haven. Visit the Goodspeed Opera House built along the Connecticut River in 1876. Restored in 1963, this small theater continue...

Hartford, Connecticut, was settled as an agrarian society with fertile fields and abundant crops at the confluence of the Connecticut and Little (later Park) Rivers by Reverend Thomas Hooker and his Puritan congregation. Navigation on the rivers quickly established the city as a center for commerce. Author Daniel Sterner delves into the history of Hartford with tours from Bushnell Park to Asylum Hill and through Frog Hollow. Discover the many people, places and events that have shaped the ...

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of frien...

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material.The author establishes how folklore pervades and reflects the region\'s economics, history (espe-cially the Civil War), race rela-tions, religion, and politics. He follows with a catalog of those folk-cultural traits-from food and crafts to music and story-that are distinc...

A revealing tour of the opulent Newport Mansions where the Astors, Vanderbilts, and other Gilded Age families spent their summers.At the turn of the twentieth century, the wealthy families of New York would vacation at their summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island. Where the salty air once mingled with the laughter of society women in ball gowns, the houses of the Newport Cliff Walk still preside in grandeur over the crashing waves below. From the grand majesty of th...

Evocative works in Tonalism, Impressionism, and Naturalism that offer relief from the urban worldThe radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm color and broken brush stroke. Artists' subject matter tended to represent a prosperous middle class at pl...