Americas Eden: Newport Landscape through the Ages

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is an award-winning architectural historian and Honorary Member of the Garden Club of America. His career in historic preservation has brought him across the globe to study and teach at cultural heritage sites and landscapes. He has lectured and published widely, presenting conference papers for UNESCO ICOMOS in Buenos Aires and Yale University’s Mellon Center in London. John’s work in preserving and interpreting historic places has been featured in The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and Martha Stewart Living, and he has appeared on the A&E documentary series America’s Castles. His publications include Newport: The Artful City (2020), “The New Thing at Newport: The Tiffany Glass Wall at Kingscote” in The Magazine Antiques (January 2013), the essay “Newport (Yale University Press, 2005), and “Newport” in Parisian Palaces of La Belle Epoque (Paris, 1992). John also writes historical fiction inspired by his globe-trekking career, publishing Gods and Girls: Tales of Art, Seduction and Obsession (2019), a collection of short stories about young heroines who encounter works of art and historic places that forever change the course of their lives. For more on John’s work, visit his website at www.johnstories.com. Photo of John Tschirch by Victoria Alla

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NEWPORT LANDSCAPES THROUGH THE AGES

America’s Eden NEWPORT LANDSCAPES THROUGH THE AGES

John R. Tschirch

I

n 1789, Jedidiah Morse proclaimed Newport, Rhode Island, and its environs the “Eden of America” in American Geography. Legendary landscape architects,

such as Frederick Law Olmsted, created dramatic gardens by the sea, and leading artists and writers, including John Frederick Kensett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thornton Wilder, cast the city as a verdant arcadia in painting, poetry, and prose. America’s Eden: Newport Landscapes through the Ages builds on the city’s iconic reputation as a centuries-old paradise and reveals Newport as a cultural landscape of national significance. This comprehensive history from European settlement in the seventeenth century to the present day is illustrated with a treasure trove of rare period maps, paintings, photographs, and landscape planning documents. A rich story of art, history, design, and horticulture awaits readers among the gardens, gazebos, and great trees of Newport.

John R. Tschirch

ISBN: 978-1-911282-50-1

America’s Eden

NEWPORT LANDSCAPES THROUGH THE AGES

Cottages” for The Encyclopedia of New England Culture

America’s Eden

John R. Tschirch

Front cover Edward van Altena, Hammersmith Farm, ca. 1920, photograph Archives of American Gardens

John R. Tschirch

Back cover H. D. Perkins, Miantonomi Hill, 1913, photograph United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site


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