The saga of Lewis & Clark

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David M. Lubin

Art historian David Lubin examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings both embraced and resisted dominant social values. Lubin argues that artists such as George Bingham and Lily Martin Spencer were aware of the underlying social conflicts of their time and that their work reflected the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child rearing, its racial disharmony, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America.--From publisher description.

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Carolyn Relei

Through the centuries, the rich tones and lovely designs of stained glass art have enhanced the doorway and entries of countless buildings, providing a welcoming aura of beauty and light. The appealing and highly inviting patterns in this splendid sourcebook make it easy for craftspeople to create 163 traditional motifs, ideal for use in sidelights, fanlights, transoms and other doorway configurations. Based on authentic originals, the attractive designs feature a dazzling array of subjects, including geometric configurations, florals and foliates in curvilinear presentations, and more. (A magnificent peacock, in a fan-shaped format, is especially spectacular.) Reminiscent of exquisite Victorian and Art Nouveau designs, these lovely patterns come in a number of useful shapes: rectangles, squares, circles, semi-circles and ovals. Artists, artisans and craftspeople looking for patterns that evoke the charm of a bygone era will find these attractive copyright-free stained glass designs lend themselves equally well to a host of other art and craft projects.

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Tom Lewis

"On January 24, 1791, President George Washington chose the site for the young nation's capital: ten miles square, it stretched from the highest point of navigation on the Potomac River, and encompassed the ports of Georgetown and Alexandria. From the moment the federal government moved to the District of Columbia in December 1800, Washington has been central to American identity and life. Shaped by politics and intrigue, poverty and largess, contradictions and compromises, Washington has been, from its beginnings, the stage on which our national dramas have played out. In Washington, the historian Tom Lewis paints a sweeping portrait of the capital city whose internal conflicts and promise have mirrored those of America writ large. Breathing life into the men and women who struggled to help the city realize its full potential, he introduces us to the mercurial French artist who created an ornate plan for the city 'en grande'; members of the nearly forgotten anti-Catholic political party who halted construction of the Washington monument for a quarter century; and the cadre of congressmen who maintained segregation and blocked the city's progress for decades. In the twentieth century Washington's Mall and streets would witness a Ku Klux Klan march, the violent end to the encampment of World War I 'Bonus Army' veterans, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the painful rebuilding of the city in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. 'It is our national center,' Frederick Douglass once said of Washington, DC; 'It belongs to us, and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and its destiny.' Interweaving the story of the city's physical transformation with a nuanced account of its political, economic, and social evolution, Lewis tells the powerful history of Washington, DC--the site of our nation's highest ideals and some of our deepest failures"--

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George Heard Hamilton

This revised and up-dated history confines itself to Russia west of the Urals, the Russia whose artistic beginnings lay in the response of a newly settled people to the impact of Christianity and the Byzantine Empire. In the first centuries the arts flourished and developed in the independent states and principalities, but gradually native schools in centres like Novgorod and Kiev gave way to centralization based on Moscow. From the emergence of Russia under Peter the Great until the late 19th century, specifically Russian qualities gave way to Western European inspiration and advice. However, as the 19th century developed, there was a reaction from foreign domination and this led to the rediscovery of native traditions.