Roger G. Kennedy

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Jennifer Komar Olivarez

Corine A. Wegener

"Largely regarded as one of the most important movements of American architecture and design, the Prairie School helped move America into the modern age. Signaling a departure from nineteenth-century formality, its practitioners sought to create buildings that were organic and would facilitate a new, progressive way of life. This guide to the treasures of the Prairie School at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts focuses not only on the museum's collection of early twentieth-century American design but also on the Institute's historic Purcell-Cutts house, one of the most significant examples of Prairie School architecture in the country. With its historic photographs, many never before published, Progressive Design in the Midwest is a combination of history, house tour, and museum guide." "The many objects in the Institute's Prairie school collection including works by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell, and George Grant Elmslie, among others, are described in detail. Along with each piece is a list of relevant texts, exhibitions, and the historical background of the piece, as well as information about the designer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Purcell-Cutts House and the Prairie School Collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Progressive Design in the Midwest

Profiles the personal qualities, political achievements, and life ambitions of Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson.

A Study in Character

Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson

Three years after Roger Kennedy retired as director of the National Park Service, from his Santa Fe home he watched as the Cerro Grande Fire moved across the Pajarito Plateau and into Los Alamos. Two hundred and thirty-five homes were destroyed, more than 45,000 acres of forest were burned, and the nation's nuclear laboratories were threatened; even before the embers had died a blame game erupted. Kennedy's career as a public servant, which encompasses appointments under five presidential administrations, convinced him that the tragedy would produce scapegoats and misinformation, and leave American lives at risk. That was unacceptable, even unforgivable. Wildfire and Americans is a passionate, deeply informed appeal that we acknowledge wildfire not as a fire problem but as a people problem. Americans are in the wrong places, damningly because they were encouraged to settle there. Politicians, scientists, and CEOs acting out of patriotism, hubris, and greed have placed their fellow countrymen in harm's way. And now, with global warming, we inhabit a landscape that has become much more dangerous. Grounded in the conviction that we owe a duty to our environment and our fellow man, Wildfire and Americans is more than a depiction of policies gone terribly awry. It is a plea to acknowledge the mercy we owe nature and mankind.

How to Save Lives, Property, and Your Tax Dollars

Wildfire and Americans

Thomas Jefferson advocated a republic of small farmers--free and independent yeomen. And yet as president he presided over a massive expansion of the slaveholding plantation system, particularly with the Louisiana Purchase, squeezing the yeomanry to the fringes and to less desirable farmland. Now Roger G. Kennedy conducts an eye-opening examination of the gap between Jefferson's stated aspirations and what actually happened. Kennedy reveals how the Louisiana Purchase had a major impact on land use and the growth of slavery. He examines the great financial interests (such as the powerful land companies that speculated in new territories and the British textile interests) that beat down slavery's many opponents in the South itself (Native Americans, African Americans, Appalachian farmers, and conscientious opponents of slavery). He describes how slaveholders' cash crops--first tobacco, then cotton--sickened the soil and how the planters moved from one desolated tract to the next. Soon the dominant culture of the entire region--from Maryland to Florida, from Carolina to Texas--was that of owners and slaves producing staple crops for international markets. The earth itself was impoverished, in many places beyond redemption. None of this, Kennedy argues, was inevitable. He focuses on the character, ideas, and ambitions of Thomas Jefferson to show how he and other Southerners struggled with the moral dilemmas presented by the presence of Indian farmers on land they coveted, by the enslavement of their workforce, by the betrayal of their stated hopes, and by the manifest damage being done to the earth itself. Jefferson emerges as a tragic figure in a tragic period. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2003.

Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause

Michael Schelling Durham

Lists sites of political, military, cultural, and commercial significance in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania

The Mid-Atlantic States

A study of American domestic architecture before the Civil War, as seen from the point of view of the wealthy patrons who commissioned the great houses, presents an original economic and cultural history of the United States

Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America, 1600-1860

The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Cities

Hidden Cities

Internationally known historian Roger G. Kennedy details the wonderful story of the evolution of architectural styles of Minnesota from 1830 to 1914.

Historic Homes of Minnesota

John M. Hall

A long, loving look at the styles of living and governing fostered by the American Greek Revival, a period that began in the 1820s and flourished until the Civil War. 200 full-color photographs. 50 black-and-white period illustrations.

Roger G. Kennedy

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