Discusses the history of America's Founding Fathers through their words and actions but also through the architectural treasures of the homes they built while they conspired to change the world.

Just as the revolutionaries of America sought to create a new society, so too did Benjamin Henry Latrobe seek to create buildings and oversee public works projects that would elevate the culture and society of the United States. This biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe narrates the challenges to and triumphs of America's first professionally trained architect and engineer.

For Gwendolyn Wright, the houses of America are the diaries of the American people. They create a fascinating chronicle of the way we have lived, and a reflection of every political, economic, or social issue we have been concerned with. Why did plantation owners build uniform cabins for their slaves? Why were all the walls in nineteenth-century tenements painted white? Why did the parlor suddenly disappear from middle-class houses at the turn of the century? How did the federal highway system change the way millions of Americans raised their families? Building the Dream introduces the parade of people, policies, and ideologies that have shaped the course of our daily lives by shaping the rooms we have grown up in. In the row houses of colonial Philadelphia, the luxury apartments of New York City, the prefab houses of Levittown, and the public-housing towers of Chicago, Wright discovers revealing clues to our past and a new way of looking at such contemporary issues as integration, sustainable energy, the needs of the elderly, and how we define "family."

It was to be a structure like no other: the largest and tallest skyscraper in the world. Initial plans for the Empire State Building called for an Art Deco masterwork to rise 1,000 feet, with 80 stories of rental space. The high-rise was to completely fill the 84,000-square-foot site of the former Waldorf-Astoria, then New Yorks most opulent hotel. Hopes were high that the Empire State Building would accelerate Midtown Manhattans stride toward commercial prominence, pulling more business uptown. Built in the early years of the Great Depression, during which one out of four New Yorkers was out of work, the Empire State Buildings construction was thought by many to be a foolish undertaking. Yet, it was completed under budget and ahead of schedule, and the commercial colossus has stood through good times and bad as a symbol of daring, beauty, and American invention.

The authors compare the "public spirited work [that] enabled diverse peoples to forge connection, gain a stake in the nation, and find intellectual challenges [to] a time when people are predominately consumers instead of producers." They offer many current examples which demonstrate encouraging changes.

Covers the land development and architectural policies and practices that the US military follows worldwide in planning, building, and expanding installations of untold extent in 140 countries.

Edsall brings home to readers the true extent of the Republican takeover of American politics, by revealing the chief architects of political revolution. The result is a masterful--and disturbing--work of political journalism.

This history of skyscrapers examines how these tall buildings affected the cityscape and the people who worked in, lived in, and visited them. Much of the focus is rightly on the architects who had the vision to design and build America's skyscrapers, but attention is also given to the steelworkers who built them, the financiers who put up the money, and the daredevils who attempt to "conquer" them in some inexplicable pursuit of fame. The impact of the skyscraper on popular culture, particularly film and literature, is also explored.

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business—fueled by millions of homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.

State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.