Incidental Architect (Perspectives on the Art and Architectural History of the United States Capitol)
by Gordon S. Brown
While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city's own. When William and Anna Maria Thornton arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1794, the new nation's capital was little more than a raw village. The Edinburgh-educated Tho...
Reflecting on fieldwork for the twenty-first century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She reveals that fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture; instead, it is an active way of focusing attention and engendering encounters and experiences. She conceives a new kind of autoethnography, making art and ethnography equal partners to follow three "waves" of her research on...
This is a biography of James Baldwin, author, one-time preacher and civil rights activist. He chose David Leeming, a close friend and colleague, to write his biography and granted him access to his correspondence. Leeming traces his life from his birth in Harlem in 1924, his self-imposed exile in Europe, his later years as political activist to his public funeral in 1987.
"You're going where?" Carol Spencer Mitchell's father demanded as she set off in 1984 to cover the Middle East as a photojournalist for Newsweek and other publications. In this intensely thoughtful memoir, Spencer Mitchell probes the motivations that impelled her, a single, Jewish woman, to document the turmoil roiling the Arab world in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as how her experiences as a photojournalist "compelled [me] to set aside [my] cameras and reexamine the way images are created, scen...
The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esq., President of the Royal Academy of London
"Let us agree," Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "that one of man's most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian." "In my 'Saint Sebastian' I remember you," Salvador Dali replied to Garcia Lorca, referring to the essay on aesthetics that Dali had just written, "and sometimes I think he is you. Let's see whether Saint Sebastian turns out to be you." This lively and intense exchange is but a glimpse into the complex relationship between two renowned and highly influential twentieth-century artists...