The Hudson River Valley was the first iconic American landscape.
Richly illustrated and compellingly written, Sanctified Landscape makes for rewarding readi.
Schuyler also finds the seeds of the modern environmental movement in the transformation of the Hudson Valley landscape.
Given these momentous changes, it is not surprising that historic preservation emerged in the Hudson Valley: the first building in the United States preserved for its historic significance is Washington\'s Headquarters in Newburgh.
Those who could afford to live some distance from jobs in the city built suburban homes or country estates.
The first generation of American tourists traveled from New York City to Cozzens Hotel and the Catskill Mountain House in search of the picturesque.
At the very moment when Artists and Writers were exploring the aesthetic potential of the Hudson Valley, the transportation revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism were transforming the region.
Schuyler\'s story unfolds during a time of great change in American history.
In Sanctified Landscape, David Schuyler recounts this story of America\'s idealization of the Hudson Valley during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As the century advanced and as landscape and history became increasingly intertwined in the national consciousness, an aesthetic identity took shape in the region through literature, art, memory, and folklore--even gardens and domestic architecture.
Painters, led by Thomas Cole, founded the Hudson River School, widely recognized as the first truly national style of art.
Here, amid the most dramatic River and mountain scenery in the eastern United States, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper created a distinctly American literature, grounded in folklore and history, that contributed to the emergence of a sense of place in the valley.
Beginning as early as the 1820s, Artists and Writers found new ways of thinking about the human relationship with the natural world along the Hudson.
The Hudson River Valley was the first iconic American landscape
