The fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses. This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.

My Side of the Mountain is a favorite middle-grade novel. This companion gives background on the author, including an interview, questions to guide reading, clues to the story's themes, plot, characters, and setting, a glossary, writing and other activities, and more. If you loved My Side of the Mountain, you need this reading companion.

"The freshness of the authors' approaches . . . is salutary. . . . The collection is stimulating and valuable."—Joan Shelley Rubin, Journal of American History

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy sociability and material comfort and were a major element in the cohesion of a greatly expanded middle class. These dwellings became the basic building blocks of explosive suburban growth during the postwar period, luring families to the metropolitan periphery from both crowded urban centers and the rural hinterlands. Detached America is the first book with a national scope to explore the design and marketing of postwar houses. James A. Jacobs shows how these houses physically document national trends in domestic space and record a remarkably uniform spatial evolution that can be traced throughout the country. Favorable government policies, along with such widely available print media as trade journals, home design magazines, and newspapers, permitted builders to establish a strong national presence and to make a more standardized product available to prospective buyers everywhere. This vast and long-lived collaboration between government and business—fueled by millions of homeowners—established the financial mechanisms, consumer framework, domestic ideologies, and architectural precedents that permanently altered the geographic and demographic landscape of the nation.

A comprehensive examination of American vernacular buildings.

A riveting and superbly illustrated account of the enigmatic House Beautiful editor’s profound influence on mid-century American taste From 1941 to 1964, House Beautiful magazine’s crusading editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon introduced and promoted her vision of “good design” and “better living” to an extensive middle-class American readership. Her innovative magazine-sponsored initiatives, including House Beautiful’s Pace Setter House Program and the Climate Control Project, popularized a “livable” and decidedly American version of postwar modern architecture. Gordon’s devotion to what she called the American Style attracted the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who became her ally and collaborator. Gordon’s editorial programs reshaped ideas about American living and, by extension, what consumers bought, what designers made, and what manufacturers brought to market. This incisive assessment of Gordon’s influence as an editor, critic, and arbiter of domestic taste reflects more broadly on the cultures of consumption and identity in postwar America. Nearly 200 images are featured, including work by Ezra Stoller, Maynard Parker, and Julius Shulman. This important book champions an often-neglected source—the consumer magazine—as a key tool for deepening our understanding of mid-century architecture and design.

Surveys the types of homes found in twenty American small towns, and discusses house plans, features, and structural forms