We might think the Egyptians were the masters of building tombs, but no other civilization has devoted more time and resources to underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been building some of the world’s most elaborate tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects. It is these objects and the concept of the tomb as a “treasure-trove” that The Art of the Yellow Springs seeks to critique, drawing on recent scholarship to examine memorial sites the way they were meant to be experienced: not as a mere store of individual works, but as a work of art itself. Wu Hung bolsters some of the new trends in Chinese art history that have been challenging the conventional ways of studying funerary art. Examining the interpretative methods themselves that guide the study of memorials, he argues that in order to understand Chinese tombs, one must not necessarily forget the individual works present in them—as the beautiful color plates here will prove—but consider them along with a host of other art-historical concepts. These include notions of visuality, viewership, space, analysis, function, and context. The result is a ground-breaking new assessment that demonstrates the amazing richness of one of the longest-running traditions in the whole of art history.

"Art and science both originate from the same human desire to understand the world within and around us. In the pages of this book, photographic art at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park is melded with cutting-edge natural sciences to search for common laws of nature through the power of observation and a willingness to embrace the unexpected. Biological evolution is the essential expression for this combination of photographic art and science. Mammoth is a window on the universe, through which fundamental understandings of nature can be directly applied around the world and throughout the cosmos."--provided by publisher.

Crispin's Crispian, the dog who belongs to himself, shares his home with a little boy.

Reproductions of paintings depicting eight U.S. national parks.

The village of Yellow Springs has perhaps the most intriguing and varied history of any site in Chester County. Archaeological evidence suggests that Lenape Indians used the sites iron-rich springwater, as did Colonial settlers as early as 1722. George Washington stayed at the site following the Battle of the Brandywine and commissioned the first permanent military hospital in North America to be built here during the Valley Forge encampment. Following the war, Yellow Springs flourished as a spa resort with the addition of new hotels, visitor amenities, and springhouses. In 1868, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania purchased the village to create the Chester Springs Soldiers Orphan School, a boarding school for orphans of Civil War soldiers. The school closed in 1912, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts bought the village to create a country school for its artists. In 1952, the film company Good News Productions moved into the village, where it produced over 400 Christian educational films and blockbuster movies such as The Blob.