Lively and accessible, this volume of six inter-disciplinary essays draws on museology, cultural geography, gender studies and literary history to explore the latest thinking about 19th century American landscape in the broadest sense. In a witty, lucid and wide-ranging introduction, T.J. Jackson Lears sets the stage for the six intriguing essays that follow: Richard White on transcendental landscapes, Sarah Burns on Winslow Homer and "the natural woman, " Michele Bogart on the neglected work of Charles R. Knight, diorama painter to the American Museum of Natural History, Elizabeth Johns on 19th century city-dwellers and day excursions, Stephen Pyne on how the Canyon became Grand, and Richard Slotkin on visual narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford.