Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the...
Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar r...
The twentieth century has seen a grand procession of promises for the city. We would have cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, as the great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated. Or we would have cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed. Or we would live in paradise on the 100th floor with our airplane hangared next door, as Hugh Ferriss and the other skyscraper Utopians of the 1920s promised. One thing was sure: the city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday, just as...
The twentieth century has seen a grand procession of promises for the city. We would have cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, as...
Howard Mansfield muses on people, places, and life in his own hometown of Hancock, New Hampshire. "Whenever Howard Mansfield writes about the world around him, I pay attention." --Mel Allen, editor, Yankee magazine "It's as if Walt Whitman had come out of the grave in the persona of Howard Mansfield for one more epic. I highly recommend this "small book" full of big ideas." --Ernest Hebert, prize-winning author of Howard Elman's Farewell, The Old American, and nine other novels.
Howard Mansfield muses on people, places, and life in his own hometown of Hancock, New Hampshire. "Whenever Howard Mansfield writes about the worl...