Empires in the Forest: Jamestown and the Beginning of AmericaIn Albemarle, photographer Robert Llewellyn and writer Avery Chenoweth explore how the landscape of Albemarle County, where the Virginia piedmont meets the Blue Ridge Mountains, and its people have helped create an American sense of identity. Complemented by Llewellyn's luxurious color photography, the narrative rolls back 15,000 years to the first signs of human habitation, continues through the Colonial period, and arrives in the modern era. The story traces the evolving culture of landscape as it has been played out in the lives of historic figures, from the Monacans to the Moderns, Thomas Jefferson to Lady Bird Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe to Teddy Roosevelt. With a sweeping view of aesthetics, spirituality, religion, and history, the book itself is a work of art, essential reading, and viewing, for anyone who has lived in, or been inspired by, the landscape of Albemarle County. Excerpt: |
From inside the book
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... Landscape was more than a home , however ; in some smooth elision over time , an early metaphysics of identity flowed into being , in which light and landscape led them into a sense of the divine . In the past , as nomads , divinity had ...
... landscape with history . Virginia is the nation's fountainhead , an invisible aquifer that replenishes with spirit those who search for more than a view in the distance . As one drives Virginia's country roads , the landscape clicks ...
... landscape the house of America . Visitors may be compelled by curiosity , piqued by an old romantic story of Pocahontas saving John Smith , or by other legends of founding fathers and battles . The ineluctable connection , though , is ...