In the eighteenth century, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America's westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap. Known as -New Virginia, - the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society. In The Planting of New Virginia Warren Hofstra offers the first comprehensive geographical history of one of North America's most significant frontier areas. By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah...

Many American democratic ideals are embodied in the public spaces of its cities, especially in Washington, D.C. In L'Enfant's Legacy architect and scholar Michael Bednar explores the public spaces of the nation's capital, examining the context of the surrounding architecture and the roles of the spaces in the changing functional life of the city.

Bednar examines the ways in which L'Enfant's innovative plan of 1791, along with later developments, symbolizes and encourages democratic freedoms and traditions. In the spaces of Capitol Square, citizens expect to encounter their...

The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In Silent Screens, photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie...