A complete picture of Robert Spencer, one of the most recognizable of the Pennsylvania impressionist painters. From his beginnings as the son of a minister and early interest in painting, through his volatile home life and battle with depression, to his death by suicide, The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds presents the definitive portrait of a great American artist.

Crowds by Gerald Stanley Lee is a thought-provoking exploration of society, human behavior, and the power of collective action. Lee’s work delves into the dynamics of crowds, examining how they form, what motivates them, and the impact they have on society. With a blend of philosophy, sociology, and commentary, the book challenges readers to think critically about the nature of crowds and their role in shaping the world. Lee’s narrative is insightful and reflective, offering a deep analysis of how crowds can both build and destroy. He examines the psychological and social forces at play, discussing how leadership, communication, and shared purpose can turn a crowd into a powerful force for change. At the same time, he warns of the dangers of mob mentality and the loss of individual thought within the collective. Crowds is celebrated for its intellectual depth and its relevance to contemporary discussions about social movements, democracy, and the power of the people. Gerald Stanley Lee’s engaging style and his ability to weave complex ideas into accessible prose make this book a timeless exploration of human society. Readers are drawn to Crowds for its insightful perspective on the collective behavior of humanity and its thought-provoking analysis of social dynamics. This book is a must-read for those interested in philosophy, sociology, and the study of human nature. Owning a copy of Crowds is like having a guide to understanding the forces that drive collective action, making it an essential addition to any intellectual library.

This book traces the origins of the Postmodern eclectic grammar of linguistic collision back in the Surrealist poetics of ruins. Keeping in mind the images of lost direction in the big city as a central figure in the discussion of both the Modern and Postmodern aesthetics of displacement, Daniele starts comparing the epiphanic encounters of the Baudelairian flâneur in metropolitan Paris - in constant search for the traces of a lost symbolic order - with Breton's enigmatic pursuit of Nadja, the elusive sphinx in the crowd who moves in a mental territory of puzzling condensations and of ineffable objets trouvé. In his visual and written work, Marcel Duchamp was probably the first artist to envision the space of the crowd as a trans-urban, multiple dimension: a cool arena of disjunctive encounters contributing to transform the Surrealist erotic space of desire in a cooler, open field of performance. Deeply influenced by Duchamp's hybrid aesthetics, American Postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, and the performance artist Laurie Anderson, represent metropolis as a “geographical incest”, as a plural, entropic semiosphere which transcends the notion of urban community to become the tolerant receptacle of an ethnic and discoursive multiplicity, an electronic area of linguistic collisions translatable in new fragmented and unfinished narratives. Evoking the assemblages of Abstract Expressionists, the debris of Simon Rodia “junk art”, and the hybrid language of Postmodern architecture, this neo-Surrealist narrative discourse transforms the epiphanic traces envisioned by the Baudelairian and Bretonian heroes in partial parodies, in enigmatic fragments whose ultimate source transcends the narrator's knowledge. The conceptual strategy which is constitutive of these texts implicitly asks the puzzled reader to disentangle the entropic plots, immerging him in the midst of a “linguistic wilderness,” where all opposites - fact and fiction, man and machine, man and female - enigmatically and humorously coexist.

Situated on Broadway between Fourteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Union Square occupies a central place in both the geography and the history of New York City. Though this compact space was originally designed in 1830 to beautify a residential neighborhood and boost property values, by the early days of the Civil War, New Yorkers had transformed Union Square into a gathering place for political debate and protest. As public use of the square changed, so, too, did its design. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned the park in the late nineteenth century, they sought to enhance its potential as a space for the orderly expression of public sentiment. A few decades later, anarchists and Communist activists, including Emma Goldman, turned Union Square into a regular gathering place where they would advocate for radical change. In response, a series of city administrations and business groups sought to quash this unruly form of dissidence by remaking the square into a new kind of patriotic space. As Joanna Merwood-Salisbury shows us in Design for the Crowd, the history of Union Square illustrates ongoing debates over the proper organization of urban space—and competing images of the public that uses it. In this sweeping history of an iconic urban square, Merwood-Salisbury gives us a review of American political activism, philosophies of urban design, and the many ways in which a seemingly stable landmark can change through public engagement and design. Published with the support of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

The Great Crowd is a social history of All Saints Episcopal Church of Omaha, Nebraska. Founded in 1885, precisely at the moment when Omaha was experiencing a spurt of rapid grown, the parish has continued to succeed as a religious community deeply enmeshed in the life of the city. It was from the beginning a distinctly urban parish and, as change came for the city, underwent its changes, including a major relocation of its facility. It also found itself navigating the changes in national culture and in the character of the larger Episcopal Church. Curiously, very different rectorseight in all, with different configurations of lay leadership drawn from across the cityresponded to these successive waves of change, and yet, they held on the conviction that they had maintained the unique identity of the parish that they had inherited from those who had gone before them. They did so in no small part by telling their story. Drawing from the parish archives, including its vestry minutes, correspondence, and publications the author, himself one of the eight rectors, has taken up a critical retelling the story bring up to 9/11, 2001. These pages contain a strange tapestry of names and faces, from Omahas cowboy mayor to its storied lawyers and devout bus drivers who melded themselves in that strange unity called a parish. In the authors telling, the story becomes a critical tool for understanding how a Christian community works and for providing a basis for a critical assessment of the purpose and meaning of religious community in American life.

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writings Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft. Poe wrote short stories, poems, journalism, and editorials with urban readers in mind. He witnessed urban slavery up close, living and working within a few blocks of slave jails and auction houses in Richmond and among enslaved workers in Baltimore. In Philadelphia, he saw an expanding city struggling to contain its own violent propensities. At a time when suburbs were just beginning to offer an alternative to crowded city dwellings, he tried living cheaply on the then-rural Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later in what is now the Bronx. Poe's urban mysteries and claustrophobic tales of troubled minds and abused bodies reflect his experiences living among the soldiers, slaves, and immigrants of the American city. Featuring evocative photographs by Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd challenges the popular conception of Poe as an isolated artist living in a world of his own imagination, detached from his physical surroundings. The Poe who emerges here is a man whose outlook and career were shaped by the cities where he lived, longing for a stable home.