Presents a tour of the houses belonging to some of America's early leaders, sharing an inside look at the domestic world of the Founding Fathers to chronicle their private lives, families, culture, interests, and aspirations.

This volume in the Nearby History series helps the reader document the history of a home. The reader will learn to examine written records, oral testimonies, visual sources, and the house's surroundings. The author covers American housing patterns, the individual characteristics of houses in different regions, construction techniques and materials, household technology, and family life styles. Houses and Homes is Volume 2 in The Nearby History Series.

Illustrated with splendid color photography by the same author-photographer team that created Rizzoli's "Wright for Wright, " this is the first volume to combine all the extant work of Jefferson. 120 full-color illustrations.

Discusses the history of America's Founding Fathers through their words and actions but also through the architectural treasures of the homes they built while they conspired to change the world.

Southern plantations are an endless source of fascination. That’s no surprise since these palatial homes are rich in history, representing a pivotal time in U.S. history that truly is “gone with the wind.” With the Civil War literally exploding all around, many of these homes were occupied either by Confederate or Union troops. Nowhere else in the south were plantations so affected by the nation’s bloodiest war than in Virginia. At times, families fled, leaving behind slaves to manage the property. There are still more than 60 plantations in Virginia today, most of them open to the public. Some have been restored, others undergoing that process. If only the walls could talk, the stories we might hear! That’s what we hope to bring into this book on The Plantations of Virginia. We’ll take the tours and talk to the guides and dig even further if there is more to discover. We hope that travelers will be enlightened before they travel to Virginia, their visits will thus be enriched, and that residents will equally love exploring this deep history of Virginia. Accompanying the text will be photographs, taken by one of the authors, showing, in all their splendor, the exteriors of these plantations, as well as areas of interest inside the buildings.

From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.