Memphis, an Architectural Guide


Book Description

Memphis is a city whose rich architectural heritage dates back to before the Civil War. This lucid, lively book, the first guide to Memphis architecture, invites readers to explore a very special urban environment, savoring its triumphs and mourning its crucial losses. Descriptions of some 550 buildings, together with 250 photographs and detailed maps, are organized to facilitate touring the city section by section. Brief histories of Memphis and of its architectural development introduce the text, while entries sketch the origins and characters of particular neighborhoods, suggesting the contexts within which individual structures were created. Of special interest are descriptions of important buildings no longer standing. With this book in hand, one can imagine a specific urban scene as it once was, then compare it with the same scene today. -- cover




Memphis


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Urban History 19:2


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Houses of God


Book Description

Houses of God is the first broad survey of American religious architecture, a cultural cross-country expedition that will benefit travelers as much as scholars. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 photographs — some by well-known photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange — this handsome book provides a highly accessible look at how Americans shape their places of worship into multifaceted reflections of their culture, beliefs, and times.




Iconoclasm and the Museum


Book Description

Iconoclasm and the Museum addresses the museum’s historic tendency to be silent about destruction through an exploration of institutional attitudes to iconoclasm, or image breaking, and the concept’s place in public display. Presenting a selection of focused case studies, Boldrick examines long-standing desires to deface, dismantle, obscure or destroy works of art and historic artefacts, as well as motivations to protect and display broken objects. Considering the effects of iconoclastic practices on artworks and cultural artefacts and how those practices are addressed in institutions, the book examines changing attitudes to the intentional destruction of powerful artworks in the past and present. It ends with an analysis of creative destruction in contemporary art making and proposes that we are entering a new phase for museums, in which they acknowledge the critical roles destruction and loss play in the lives of objects and in contemporary political life. Iconoclasm and the Museum will be important reading for academics and students in fields such as museum and gallery studies, archaeology, art history, arts management, curatorial studies, cultural studies, history, heritage and religious studies. The book should also be of great interest to museum professionals, curators and collections management specialists, and artists.




A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised)


Book Description

The fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses. This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.




A Bibliography of Tennessee History, 1973-1996


Book Description

With some 6,000 entries, A Bibliography of Tennessee History will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone--students, historians, librarians, genealogists--engaged in researching Tennessee's rich and colorful past. A sequel to Sam B. Smith's invaluable 1973 work, Tennessee History: A Bibliography, this book follows a similar format and includes published books and essays, as well as many unpublished theses and dissertations, that have become available during the intervening years. The volume begins with sections on Reference, Natural History, and Native Americans. Its divisions then follow the major periods of the state's history: Before Statehood, State Development, Civil War, Late Nineteenth Century, Early Twentieth Century, and Late Twentieth Century. Sections on Literature and County Histories round out the book. Included is a helpful subject index that points the reader to particular persons, places, incidents, or topics. Substantial sections in this index highlight women's history and African American history, two areas in which scholarship has proliferated during the past two decades. The history of entertainment in Tennessee is also well represented in this volume, including, for example, hundreds of citations for writings about Elvis Presley and for works that treat Nashville and Memphis as major show business centers. The Literature section, meanwhile, includes citations for fiction and poetry relating to Tennessee history as well as for critical works about Tennessee writers. Throughout, the editors have strived to achieve a balance between comprehensive coverage and the need to be selective. The result is a volume that will benefit researchers for years to come. The Editors: W. Calvin Dickinson is professor of history at Tennessee Technological University. Eloise R. Hitchcock is head reference librarian at the University of the South.




Graceland


Book Description

Describes what Graceland, the home Elvis Presley built in Memphis, tells about the late singer's life and personality.




The Papers of Jefferson Davis


Book Description

Volume 13 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the Confederacy as he becomes head of the Carolina Life Insurance Company of Memphis and attempts to gain a financial foothold for his newly reunited family. Having lost everything in the Civil War and spent two years immediately afterwards in federal prison, Davis faced a mounting array of financial woes, health problems, and family illnesses and tragedies in the 1870s. Despite setbacks during this decade, Davis also began a quest to rehabilitate his image and protect his historical legacy. Although his position with the insurance company provided temporary financial stability, Davis resigned after the Panic of 1873 forced the sale of the company and its new owners canceled payments to Carolina policyholders. He left for England the following year in search of employment and to recuperate from ongoing illnesses. In 1876, Davis became president of the London-based Mississippi Valley Society and relocated to New Orleans to run the company. Throughout the 1870s, Davis waged an expensive and seemingly endless legal battle to regain his prewar Mississippi plantation, Brierfield. He also began working on his memoirs at Beauvoir, the Gulf Coast estate of a family friend. Though disfranchised, Davis addressed the subject of politics with more frequency during this decade, criticizing the Reconstruction policies of the federal government while defending the South and the former Confederacy. The volume ends with Davis's inheritance of Beauvoir, which was his last home. The editors have drawn from over one hundred manuscript repositories and private collections in addition to numerous published sources in compiling Volume 13.




Architecture in Texas


Book Description

Written in an accessible style, Henry's work places Texas architecture in the wider context of American architectural history by tracing the development of building in the state from late Victorian styles, and the rise of neoclassicism, to the advent of the International Style.... His work provides a welter of new facts, both about the era's buildings and the architects who designed them, and he has catalogued and described most of the important landmarks of the period. -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly ., .a significant contribution to the study of Texas architecture.... -- Drury Blakeley Alexander, author of Texas Homes of the Nineteenth Century Texas architecture of the twentieth century encompasses a wide range of building styles, from an internationally inspired modernism to the Spanish Colonial Revival that recalls Texas' earliest European heritage. This book is the first comprehensive survey of Texas architecture of the first half of the twentieth century. More than just a catalog of buildings and styles, the book is a social history of Texas architecture. Jay C. Henry discusses and illustrates buildings from around the state, drawing a majority of his examples from the ten to twelve largest cities and from the work of major architects and firms, including C. H. Page and Brother, Trost and Trost, Lang and Witchell, Sanguinet and Staats, Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres, David Williams, and O'Neil Ford. The majority of buildings he considers are public ones, but a separate chapter traces the evolution of private housing from late-Victorian styles through the regional and international modernism of the 1930s. Nearly 400 black-and-white photographs complement thetext. Written to be accessible to general readers interested in architecture, as well as to architectural professionals, this work shows how Texas both participated in and differed from prevailing American architectural traditions.