In Atlanta and Environs, historian Franklin M. Garrett wrote that Oakland Cemetery is "Atlanta's most tangible link between the past and the present." Within its forty-eight acres are more than seventy thousand personal stories--of settlers and immigrants who forged a city from a rowdy railroad camp, former slaves who carved out lives in a segregated world, soldiers in blue and gray who were cut down in a brutal civil war, and civic and business visionaries who rebuilt the Phoenix City from the ashes of war and carried it to prominence on the international stage.

Today,...

George Alexander Grant is an unknown elder in the field of American landscape photography. Just as they did the work of his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others, millions of people viewed Grant s photographs; unlike those contemporaries, few even knew Grant s name. Landscapes for the People shares his story through his remarkable images and a compelling biography profiling patience, perseverance, dedication, and an unsurpassed love of the natural and historic places that Americans chose to preserve.

A Pennsylvania native, Grant was introduced to the parks...