Description
Offering sea-level access through the Adirondacks, the Hudson River once helped the country’s largest and most innovative iron, cotton, and ship manufacturers send their goods to remote locations around the world. The river’s untamed landscape cultivated our first homegrown works of art, literature, and design, inspiring poets to populate the Hudson’s banks with folklore and fairies and millionaires to build airy castles on its shores. To this day, the Hudson remains a central waterway reflecting the imagination, ambition, and restlessness of the American heart. The journey from the river’s source in the mountains to its termination in New York Bay reveals the grand sweep of industry and culture as it has evolved in our country and radiated out into the world. In this richly illustrated book, Frances F. Dunwell tells the history of the “magical alchemy between a river, its people, and the ideas of the times.” Beginning with the age of Dutch exploration and concluding with the environmental cleanup initiatives that set a national precedent for conservation, Dunwell presents a portrait of the river that’s as varied as its own landscape.Consulting diaries, maps, books, and letters, she looks at the Hudson through the lenses of the Revolutionary War, the perspective of the Knickerbocker writers and the Hudson River school painters, the “bare-knuckle” era of the robber barons, the industrial age, and the environmental movements launched after the first Earth Day. Dunwell captures the spirit of the Hudson through the voices and lives of those who changed the river and were, in turn, changed by it. The history of the Hudson embodies much of what is significant about America-our culture and military, our innovations in manufacturing and transportation, and our artistic, recreational, and environmental heritage.
