BiblioVault - Books about 1860

The English House, 1860-1914

The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture

Gavin Stamp and André Goulancourt

University of Chicago Press, 1986

Ranging from picturesque cottages to Romantic manor houses, this illustrated survey of British domestic architecture in the Victorian era documents styles still popular today. André Goulancourt's superb photographs of urban, suburban, and country homes are combined with Gavin Stamp's commentary to unique effect. What emerges is not only a stunning visual record but also a lesson on the creative development of national and vernacular building traditions.

Stamp suggests that the characteristic features of British domestic design in this era were symbolic and interpretive as well as functional. Reacting against modern industrialism and materialism, Victorian builders, in tandem with the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, revived vernacular traditions. Emphasis was placed on the proper use of building materials found locally and on elements that would later recur in the American Prairie House: the heavy pitched roof and the oversized and centrally placed chimney and fireplace. A number of domestic styles that emerged during this period, such as the Shingle style and the Queen Anne style, were imported by American architects and clients who shared the Victorian reverence for home, privacy, and the family unit.

In addition to the interpretive text and catalog of eighty-seven buildings, The English House, 1860-1914 includes brief biographies of the sixty-three architects represented, including Pugin, Butterfield, Street, and Prior. Historians of both English and American architecture, as well as practicing architects and critics, will welcome this comprehensive volume.

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Everyone’s Theater

Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914

Michael Meeuwis

University of Michigan Press, 2019

Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.

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The Song of the Hammer and Drill

The Colorado San Juans, 1860-1914

Duane A. Smith

University Press of Colorado, 2000

As one of the great mining regions of Colorado and the United States, the San Juan Mountains provide insight into the development of both the industry and the state. First published in 1982, Song of the Hammer and Drill, with the help of more than 100 historical photographs, traces the mining and urban history of the San Juans from 1860-1914 through the lives of the people who opened, settled, and developed the beautiful but rugged mineral-rich peaks of southwestern Colorado.

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Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914

Brian Ladd

Harvard University Press, 1990

This unique contribution to social and urban history describes the struggle of prosperous German bourgeois leaders to bring order to their rapidly growing cities during the tumultuous age of industrial expansion in the decades before World War I. Brian Ladd sets the emerging theory and practice of city planning in the context of debates about the nature of the modern city and the possibility of improving society by regulating its physical environment. In so doing, he reveals the extent to which modern city planning is a product of the aspirations, prejudices, and frustrations of the German burghers who created it.

He sifts through the often contradictory motives underlying public health works (including waterworks, sewers, baths, and parks); plans for streets and squares, especially in new developments; working-class housing, zoning, public transit, and aesthetic concerns. He examines planning as civic boosterism and as social reform, identifying the reformers and describing their role in urban politics and society. His analysis focuses on Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Frankfurt-am-Main, but also pays considerable attention to Berlin and other cities.

This broad-gauged view of an increasingly popular subject will enlighten historians of Germany and of modern Europe, urban historians, city planners, and architectural historians.

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