John Forrest (1847 1918), was an Australian surveyor and explorer. At twenty-two, he led an expedition to determine the fate of Ludwig Leichardt, who had earlier disappeared in the western desert. The following year he surveyed the coastal route from Perth to Adelaide, establishing the possibility of a telegraph line. In 1874, he crossed the central western desert, a two-thousand mile journey which confirmed his heroic reputation. He received the founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society in London and was appointed Deputy Surveyor-General. His account of these expeditions, published...

Lord I'm Coming Home focuses on a small, white, rural fishing community on the southern reaches of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. By menas of a new kind of anthropological fieldwork, John Forrest seeks to document the entire aesthetic experience of a group of people, showing the aesthetic to be an "everyday experience and not some...