Author: Edmund Pendleton Tompkins Publisher: ISBN: Category : Natural Bridge (Va.) Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
The gem of the idea of this small history had its origin in the mind of Mr. J. Lee Davis, co-author of this work, who is the President of the company now owning The Bridge, and to whom much is due for the wonderful development of this large and important property, and its present high state of perfection. To Mr. Davis is also due the credit for collecting much of the material going into this undertaking. -- Preface.
Author: Claudette Stager Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572334670 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Looking beyond the Highway is an examination of road history and roadside attractions specific to the South. Focused in part on numerous aspects of thematerial culture landscape of the Dixie Highway, the essays consider the politics of roadbuilding, roadside entertainment, the buildings and businesses one might encounter along the road, and regional adaptations to the needs and desires of northern tourists. Following the Dixie Highway from southern Illinois to Florida with sidetrips down other southern roads, the essays cover a wide variety of subjects, many of which will resonate with anyone who has ever lived in or vacationed in the South: Harrison Mayes's “Get Right With God” signs; the park-and-pray craze of outdoor drive-in church services; the rise and demise of brick highways; the fierce political battle over the route of the Dixie Highway; beach music and the evolution of motel architecture in Myrtle Beach; Florida's early tourist towers; and the commercial development of Tennessee caves as tourist attractions. Covering a landscape that includes Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia, Arkansas, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, and Illinois, the anthology shows that there was and still is a distinctive southern culture and how roads have influenced that culture. As lively as they are diverse, thearticles provide a solid background for understanding roadside ephemera that have disappeared or are quickly disappearing. Ranging from the serious to the light-hearted and including descriptions of American road and roadside icons to kitsch, the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in road history and roadside architecture.
Author: Ernst H. Kastning, Ph.D. Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1467122386 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
Natural Bridge, located in the historic Shenandoah Valley, is one of the most recognized and visited geologic landmarks in the country. The massive 90-foot-wide arch spans Cedar Creek, which runs 200 feet below. Legend says that George Washington, as a young land surveyor, carved his initials on its wall. In 1774, King George III granted ownership to Thomas Jefferson. Natural Bridge was often regarded as the Eighth Natural Wonder of the World during the 19th and 20th centuries. The site became a popular venue for events, ranging from conventions to the annual Easter Sunrise Service. Hotels, inns, and cottages were built to accommodate travelers, and on-site attractionsincluding a show cave, a wax museum, and a Monacan Indian villagebroadened visitor appeal. Natural Bridge remained privately owned until 2014, when the title was transferred, allowing it to become a state park; the bridge will now truly belong to the people, a concept that would have made Jefferson proud. -- Amazon.com.
Author: Earl Swift Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813937213 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any other feature of the American landscape -- as home to the continent's first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil War, and birthplace of America's twentieth-century navy. In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater, not to mention man-made obstacles, to challenge even experienced paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself -- he hoped not literally -- in the river and its history. What Swift survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in a fourteen-foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his sidekick Martin -- whose photographs accompany the text -- Swift points his bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay. Readers who accompany him through his Journey on the James will come away with the accumulated pleasure, if not the bruises and mud, of four hundred miles of adventure and history in the life of one of America's great watersheds.
Author: Andrew J. Lewis Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812243080 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Chronicles the story of American naturalists who came of age and stumbled toward a profession in the years after the American Revolution. --from publisher description.
Author: Rebecca C. McIntyre Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 081305978X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
"Written in a clear, accessible, and lively style, Souvenirs of the Old South will be the foundational work for subsequent scholars and readers interested in tourism in the New South."--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory "This study of southern images offers readers a glimpse of how history, culture, race, and class came together in the tourist imagination. If the South emerged from the Civil War a distinctive place, Rebecca McIntyre would remind us that’s because distinctiveness sells."--Richard Starnes, author of Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina Less than a decade after the conclusion of the Civil War, northern promoters began pushing images of a mythic South to boost tourism. By creating a hierarchical relationship based on region and race in which northerners were always superior, promoters saw tourist dollars begin flowing southward, but this cultural construction was damaging to southerners, particularly African Americans. Rebecca McIntyre focuses on the years between 1870 and 1920, a period framed by the war and the growth of automobile tourism. These years were critical in the creation of the South’s modern identity, and she reveals that tourism images created by northerners for northerners had as much effect on making the South "southern" as did the most ardent proponents of the Lost Cause. She also demonstrates how northern tourism contributed to the worsening of race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Author: Eleanor Jones Harvey Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300187335 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.
Author: David E. Nye Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262640343 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.
Author: Edmund Pendleton Tompkins
Author: Claudette Stager
Author: Ernst H. Kastning, Ph.D.
Author: J. Lee Davis
Author: David Pepper
Author: Earl Swift
Author: Andrew J. Lewis
Author: Rebecca C. McIntyre
Author: Eleanor Jones Harvey
Author: David E. Nye