C Zanne S Shadows

The Arabian Stud Book

In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett

“Well-researched and well argued, provocative and imaginative, In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett examines the image of the “pure” Appalachian Anglo-Saxons who furnished hope for the future, and the less flattering image of the degenerate, poverty-stricken mountaineers with blood on their hands. In a wide-ranging exploration that reaches from Teddy Roosevelt to JFK, Ian C. Hartman examines the idea of Appalachian exceptionalism over time and what that has meant for the region and for America.” —James C. Klotter, state historian of Kentucky and professor of history, Georgetown College Extending from the southern Appalachians through the rolling hills of Kentucky and Tennessee to the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri, the upland South emerged in American lore as the setting where Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and other rugged frontiersmen forged a modern nation and headed west to become the progenitors of what some viewed as a new and superior “American race.” Others, however, saw this region as the breeding ground of poor, debased whites—the “hillbillies” and “white trash” of popular stereotypes. These conflicting identities have long dominated public discourse about the region, as well as fostered a deep fascination with it. In this compelling study, part political and part cultural history, Ian C. Hartman probes the late-nineteenth-century context from which this paradox arose and the array of personalities, expressions, and policies that sought to resolve it—or at least make sense of it—in the decades that followed. He begins by investigating the writings of “race theorists” including future president Theodore Roosevelt, whose multivolume The Winning of the West (1889–96) furthered the tale of a heroic and distinctly American stock who, “with axe and rifle,” conquered a continent. Hartman relates these myths to the rise of the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement, which sought to regenerate and purify a once proud but now impoverished and degraded people through policies that included forced sterilization to weed out “imbeciles.” Hartman goes on to showcase the surprising ways in which the contradictory identity of the upland South affected broader national debates about imperialism, crime and punishment, poverty and inequality, and the growth and decline of the postwar welfare state. Whether considering the racial implications of a 1930s Appalachian folk festival, the stereotypical but often sympathetic portrayals of rural southerners in sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show, or the shifting perceptions of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, In the Shadow of Boone and Crockett is a consistently provocative book that invites readers to ponder a fresh a set of ideas about America’s “race history” that have shown remarkable traction for more than a century. Ian C. Hartman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, Appalachian Journal, and Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia, among other publications.

Cézanne in the Studio

In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them sill lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cézanne in the Study: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he changed his still lifes with new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. Carol Armstrong’s study is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion, The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and detail.