''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
Thanks for the link, Gintaras.
ReplyDeleteI love these posters -- the ranger naturalists were the topic of my MA thesis and will probably make some sort of appearance in my dissertation. That's what I was copying yesterday in the archives -- the early letters of assignment under Albright.
Did you know that many of the earliest naturalists in Yellowstone were women? A couple in Yosemite as well. Then they passed a regulation that naturalists are men and that's that (although the botanist in Yellowstone refuses to go away).
I was just looking back through this link and realized that this is the book on park architecture I read a few years back. I need to buy this one at some point.
ReplyDeleteAv, here's a wonderful site where you can shop for all kinds of cool NP retro stuff, including WPA posters,
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theparksco.com/
Very cool!
ReplyDeleteI have a friend in Livingston who designed some 30s-style luggage tags etc for tourists. I love that period, but then those were my people. I'm a New Dealer at heart (although I have to always assure my younger colleagues that I'm not _that_ old!).