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John C. Fremont was the most celebrated explorer of his era. In
1842, on the first of five expeditions he would lead to the Far
West, Fremont and a small party of men journeyed up the Kansas and
Platte Rivers to the Wind River Range in Wyoming. At the time,
virtually this entire region was known as the Great Desert, and
many Americans viewed it and the Rocky Mountains beyond as natural
barriers to the United States. After Congress published Fremont's
official report of the expedition, however, few doubted the nation
should expand to the Pacific. The first in-depth study of this
remarkable report, Sight Unseen argues that Fremont used both a
radical form of art and an imaginary map to create an aesthetic
desire for expansion. He not only redefined the Great Desert as a
novel and complex environment, but on a summit of the Wind River
Range, he envisioned the Continental Divide as a feature that would
unify rather than impede a larger nation. In addition to provoking
the great migration to Oregon and providing an aesthetic
justification for the National Park system, Fremont's report
profoundly altered American views of geography, progress, and the
need for a transcontinental railroad. By helping to shape the very
notion of Manifest Destiny, the report became one of the most
important documents in the history of American landscape.
Learning from Thoreau is an intimate intellectual walk with
America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of
the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an
intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau
along with the author-whose lifelong engagement with this "genius
of the natural world" leads him to examine the process of learning
from an admired model. Using both images and text, Andrew Menard
offers a personal meditation on Thoreau's thought, its originality,
and its influence on the modern environmental movement. He places
Thoreau in dialogue with contemporary artists and thinkers and
associates him with a rich variety of places: Walden Pond, the
Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller State Park Preserve in
upstate New York, Mormon Mesa northeast of Las Vegas, and the old
town of Koenigsberg, Prussia. Each place, each experience, each
writer, and each work of art provides a different line of approach.
The author also leads us through an expanding and deepening series
of keywords that trigger fresh occasions to learn from Thoreau:
Concord, Walden, walking, seeing, nature, wildness, beauty. The
result is a deeply nuanced and informed portrait of Thoreau's inner
and outer landscape.
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