James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) invented the key forms of American fiction—the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain—who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his “literary offenses.” His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Cooper’s fictions traced native losses to their economic sources. Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Cooper’s life to be based on full access to his family papers. Cooper’s life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavors, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years covers Cooper’s life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

Originally published in 2003. In Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Helen Tangires examines the role of the public marketplace—social and architectural—as a key site in the development of civic culture in America. More than simply places for buying and selling food, Tangires explains, municipally owned and operated markets were the common ground where citizens and government struggled to define the shared values of the community. Public markets were vital to civic policy and reflected the profound belief in the moral economy—the effort on the part of the municipality to maintain the social and political health of its community by regulating the ethics of trade in the urban marketplace for food. Tangires begins with the social, architectural, and regulatory components of the public market in the early republic, when cities embraced this ancient system of urban food distribution. By midcentury, the legalization of butcher shops in New York City and the incorporation of market house companies in Pennsylvania challenged the system and hastened the deregulation of this public service. Some cities demolished their marketing facilities or loosened restrictions on the food trades in an effort to deal with the privatization movement. However, several decades of experience with dispersed retailers, suburban slaughterhouses, and food transported by railroad proved disastrous to the public welfare, prompting cities and federal agencies to reclaim this urban civic space.

Founded in 1791, the Albany Institute of History and Art is one of the nation's oldest cultural institutions. Today, it boasts outstanding collections largely focused on New York State's Upper Hudson Valley. These include Hudson River School landscape paintings, portraits by Ezra Ames and Charles Loring Elliott, sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer, landscape and interior paintings by Walter Launt Palmer, and Albany –made silver and other crafts. This comprehensive overview of the Albany Institute of History and Art's American art and decorative-arts collections, presents color plates and essays on about 130 objects (of a total exceeding 20,000). Dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the 1990s, each object in this volume was chosen for its national significance, artistic merit, and relevance to the Institute's mission: collecting and interpreting the art, history, and culture of New York State's Upper Hudson Valley through four centuries.

Overview of the life, work, times, and legacy of renowned Albany potter Paul Cushman (1767-1833)