The Schuylkill River flows more than 100 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to the Delaware River. It passes through five counties - Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia - and its valley is home to more than three million people, yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards. Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816. In the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled - but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it? Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she traveled upriver repeatedly to bushwhack along the riverbanks and to row and paddle in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of a bold industrial innovation that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry and obstructive dams meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, from Pottsville to Reading, Birdsboro to Phoenixville, Bridgeport to Philadelphia. Along with Sorlien's full-color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all. Inland is the first to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.

John Stilgoe is just looking around. This is more difficult than it sounds, particularly in our mediated age, when advances in both theory and technology too often seek to replace the visual evidence before our own eyes rather than complement it. We are surrounded by landscapes charged with our past, and yet from our earliest schooldays we are instructed not to stare out the window. Someone who stops to look isn't only a rarity; he or she is suspect. Landscape and Images records a lifetime spent observing America's constructed landscapes. Stilgoe's essays follow the eclectic trains of thought that have resulted from his observation, from the postcard preference for sunsets over sunrises to the concept of ""teen geography"" to the unwillingness of Americans to walk up and down stairs. In Stilgoe's hands, the subject of jack o' lanterns becomes an occasion to explore centuries-old concepts of boundaries and trespassing, and to examine why this originally pagan symbol has persisted into our own age. Even something as mundane as putting the cat out before going to bed is traced back to fears of unwatched animals and an untended frontier fireplace. Stilgoe ponders the forgotten connections between politics and painted landscapes and asks why a country whose vast majority lives less than a hundred miles from a coast nonetheless looks to the rural Midwest for the classic image of itself. At times breathtaking in their erudition, the essays collected here are as meticulously researched as they are elegantly written. Stilgoe's observations speak to specialists-whether they be artists, historians, or environmental designers-as well as to the common reader. Our landscapes constitute a fascinating history of accident and intent. The proof, says Stilgoe, is all around us.

Trains have a nostalgic connotation for most Americans, but John Stilgoe argues that we should be looking to rail lines as the path to our future, not just our past. Train Time picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Corridor left off, carrying Stilgoe's ideas about the spatial consequences of railways up to the present moment. With containers bringing the production of a global economy to our ports, the price of oil skyrocketing, and congestion and sprawl forcing many Americans to live far from work, trains offer an obvious alternative to a culture dependent on cars and long-haul trucking. Arguing that the train is returning, "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States," Stilgoe posits a future for railways as powerful shapers of American life.

For anyone looking for prescient analysis and compelling history of the American landscape and economy in general and railroad and transit history in particular, Train Time is an engaging look at the future of our railroads and of transportation and land development. For those familiar with John Stilgoe's talent for seeing things that elude the rest of us, and delivering those observations in pithy asides about real estate, corporate culture, and other aspects of American life, this book will not disappoint.

This fascinating "prehistory" of the American Suburb traces its evolution from the mid-1800's to the onset of World War II. Using a rich array of contemporary written and pictorial sources, prize-winning historian John R. Stilgoe guides us through the early suburbs of Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, showing us not only how they looked but what life was like for the men and women who lived there. "In chronicling this great exodus and its impact-on culture, women architecture, and myriad other aspects of American society-Stilgoe displays with, scholarship, and insight, as well as delight in searching out meanings in his sources...The book itself is handsome and well illustrated, blessed with a lively text, saturated with evocative and vivid detail."-David Slovic, Philadelphia Inquirer "Stilgoe's research is thorough, his approach original and engaging, and his book a delight to read, filled with illustrations-pictorial and verbal-that help illustrate the phenomenon more clearly and deeply."-Merle Rubin, Christians Science Monitor "A provocative look at American culture...Borderland makes serious social history accessible and engaging."-Caryn James, New York Times "Borderland offers a fresh perspective on the zone between rural space and urban residential rings, and it challenges our assumptions about what constitutes a good life."-Kenneth Jackson, Progressive Architecture John R. Stilgoe is the Robert & Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University. He is also the author of Common Landscape of American, 1580 to 1845 and Metropolitan Corridor. Railroads and the American Scene.

"A first-rate introduction to a still largely extant North America away from the great cities. This 400-page documentary by a dedicated exploring scholar explains how and why the landscape changed between the times of the early Spanish settlers and the impact of industrialization."-House and Garden "A remarkable book. John Stilgoe has provided us with a panorama of American land development that is unique in the literature of this filed. In the process he has sharpened the reader's perception of the historic struggle between those who would tend the land and those who would exploit it, thus making a significant statement about issues in the forefront at the present day. Stilgoe's global vision over time, combined with his remarkable facility for involving a great variety of elements into one coherent system of thought and feeling, makes this a deeply important and timely work."-Edmund N. Bacon "Recalls how Europeans shaped this country's landscape out of wilderness and, by the way, helped to create our sense of beauty, comfort, and appropriateness...A book that will change the way its readers look about them."-The New Yorker "Focusing on vernacular design and its evolution, Stilgoe effectively demonstrates how builders (rather than professional designers) passed on their traditions from one generation to the next-in so doing shaping America's enduring attitudes towards landscape. An original and fascinating study."-H. Ward Jandl, Library Journal Winner of the 1982 Francis Parkman Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History.