Biography, Artists and Architects

Incidental Architect
William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794–1828
By Gordon S. Brown

While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.When William and Anna Maria Thornton arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1794, the new nation’s capital was little more than a raw village.

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s Capital
Edited by William C. Dickinson, Donald R. Kennon, and Dean A. Herrin

At the age of thirty-six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D.C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G. Totten. It was a fateful assignment, both for the nation’s capital and for the bright, ambitious, and politically connected West Point graduate.Meigs’s forty-year tenure in the nation’s capital was by any account spectacularly successful.

Frozen in Silver
The Life and Frontier Photography of P. E. Larson
By Ronald T. Bailey

In 1898 men and women from all over the world converged on Alaska. Gold had been discovered. In the Yukon Territory, all winter long eager gold seekers struggled over the mountain passes connecting Canada with the United States. A small group of photographers chronicled this epic, creating images of men and women laboring through blinding snowstorms over the windswept, ice-covered mountains. One of that group was a young Swedish immigrant by the name of P. E. Larson.Frozen