"Almost all of the book appeared initially in the New Yorker." Bibliography: p. [227]-240.

As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America's most popular and idealized images. In Main Street Revisited, the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney's Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps for his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street's distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness.

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied—a German naturalist—and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832–34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors—designed to illustrate Maximilian’s journals—now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer’s landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River. To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites—all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm’s photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time—and the encroachment of a built environment—across diverse landscapes. Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America’s ever-changing environment.

A look at major events in U.S. and world history as they influenced, and as they may have been influenced by, the cultivation and use of hemp.

In 1854, a group of engineers and railroad businessmen drew a straight line from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast, built a railroad along the line, and created Atlantic City. From the 1850s to the 1950s, the city attracted the creme of American society and the working class alike and gave birth to the beauty pageant, rolling chair, boardwalk, saltwater taffy, jitney, and the successful Monopoly board game. But the onset of air travel in the 1950s and the aging grand hotels brought Atlantic City to its knees. The opening of Resorts International in 1978 and the prosperous gaming business that followed in its wake helped the city rise from its own ashes, and a year-round tourism industry exploded. Garish and opulent casino hotels replaced many of the boardwalk dowagers, and new palaces transformed the once desolate marina section into a vibrant destination.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

Early America Revisited is a vigorous defense and amplification of Ivan Van Sertima's classic work, They Came Before Columbus. The book makes a carefully balanced case for an African presence in America before Columbus' voyages. At the same time, the work in no way denies the importance of the Columbus voyages for opening up the New World to Europe, and hence changing the economic and political map of the world for all time. Van Sertima's critical cutting edge is that there is an anthropological and ethnographic dimension to the process of discovery, one in which black Africans of non-European origins played a central role. He marshals literary and pictorial evidence and shows its authenticity to be beyond question. The impact of these early discoveries is of far more than historical interest. They serve as a basis to examine anew the study of culture contacts between civilizations, and in so doing, offer a serious base to a multifaceted re-examination of earlier hypotheses of influences in both directions. Early America Revisited provides anthropological evidence about the physical presence of Africans in pre-Columbian America. It is also the study of how two peoples and cultures can lead to cross-fertilization. The borrowing of artifacts and ideas does not mean that the outsider is superior to the native, or that indigenous cultures are insignificant. Van Sertima contends that such relationships can be unpleasant as well as pleasant, conflictual as well as consensual. But, whatever the character of the interaction, its very existence merits awareness. This book is likely to engender disputes and disagreements. But there is no question that it will enrich the study of a wide range of subjects, from archaeology to anthropology, and result in profound changes in the reordering of historical priorities and pedagogy. It should be of wide interest to social scientists, historians, and all those for whom the question of race and culture is a central facet of their own work and lives. Jacqueline L. Patten Van Sertima, who is responsible for the photographic materials in this volume, has had her work exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, the National Urban League, Columbia University, and many galleries across the country. Her publications include The Black Photographers Annual and Black Photographers.