Adventures of America 1857 - 1900 First Edition 1938 by John A. Kouwenhoven

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ADVENTURES OF AMERICA 1857 - 1900 First Edition 1938 By JOHN A. KOUWENHOVEN
A PICTORIAL RECORD FROM HARPER'S WEEKLY
HARPER … Read more ADVENTURES OF AMERICA 1857 - 1900 First Edition 1938 By JOHN A. KOUWENHOVEN
A PICTORIAL RECORD FROM HARPER'S WEEKLY
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
New York and London
New York & London: Harper & Brothers, 1938
Full unsized oatmeal cloth, titles & decoration on paper labels, 255 numbered illustrations with index. Paper & spine toning. Selection of representative illustrations from Harper's Weekly with captions written by Kouwenhoven. Before 1893, the illustrations are mostly wood engravings. partway through 1893 half-tone illustrations rapidly take over.

Measurements are 9.25”W x 1.5”D x 12.25”H.

PREFACE
THIS book is an informal history of life in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The text is designed both to explain and interpret the pictures, as captions
would do, and to provide as connected and interesting a survey of social history as possible.
The pictures have been chosen from Harper's Weekly, the most representative illustrated journal of the time. Begun in the panic year of 1857, the Weekly built up an enormous circulation during the Civil War. In April, 1865, the North American Review carried an article about it which said,
"It has been one of the most powerful organs of public opinion. Its vast circulation, deservedly secured and maintained by the excellence of its illustrations of the scenes and events of the war, as well as by the spirit and tone of its editorials, has carried it far and wide. It has been read in city parlors, in the log-hut of the pioneer, by every camp-fire of our armies, in the wards of our hospitals, in the trenches before Peters-burg, and in the ruins of Charleston. ... Our historical societies and public libraries throughout the country should secure a complete set of the volumes of Harper's Weekly, for every year will add to their value as an illustrated record of the times."
This enviable position of editorial influence was maintained until, in the second decade of the present century, the Weekly succumbed to the competition of the Sunday newspaper supplements.
To us the triumph of the Weekly was its artists men like Thomas Nast, Winslow Homer, C. A. Reinhart, E. A. Abbey, Frederick Remington, and their compeers, who perfected journalistic illustration. Up until the last years of the century their pictures were either drawn directly on, or transferred to, blocks of box-wood. Skilled engravers then cut away all the wooden surface not covered by lines of the drawing, and the printing was done from the resulting blocks. In order to accomplish this lengthy process speedily enough to issue the paper once a week, a large staff of engravers was employed. Full-page or double-page illustrations were divided into sections, each of which might be engraved by a different man; after which the small blocks were locked together in a form, from which the entire picture was printed as a unit. The pictures on pages oo and oo, for example, show quite clearly the joints between the various component blocks.
As we look at the pictures in the old Weekly, we are apt to be struck with a feeling that they are distorted and unreal. They did not seem so to those who bought them at contemporary newsstands.
They are not merely quaint survivals from the past, but also vivid evidence of the way our ancestors looked at the America in which they lived. If we could climb back through the years and see the very scenes which are pictured in this book, they would not look like that to us. But they did look so to Americans of those days. In 1867 Walt Whitman sent his mother a copy of the Weekly…. See less