Introduced in the United States as a new material for statuary in the mid-nineteenth century, zinc has properties that allowed replication at low cost. It was used to produce modestly priced serial sculpture displayed throughout the nation on fountains, public monuments, and war memorials. Imitative finishes created the illusion of more costly bronze, stone, or polychrome wood. This first comprehensive overview of American zinc sculpture is interdisciplinary, engaging aspects of art history, popular culture, local history, technology, and art conservation. Included is a generously illustrated catalogue presenting more than eight hundred statues organized by type: trade figures and Indians, gods and goddesses, fountain figures, animals, famous men, military figures, firemen, cemetery memorials, and religous subjects. The compilation of data on these statues will be valuable to scholars, filling the current void in research libraries. The author's experience as a conservator will also make the an essential resource for historic preservationists seeking to repair statues now damaged by years of outdoor exposure. This book has 555 illustrations, 354 of which are in color. Carol Grissom is Senior Objects Conservator at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute.

The annual collections in the History of Technology series look at the history of technological discovery and change, exploring the relationship of technology to other aspects of life and showing how technological development is affected by the society in which it occurred.

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one women set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. Moving south to follow the herds, they intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunter, or "hide men." At a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations After operating for only a few months, the post was attacked one sultry June morning by angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose physical and cultural survival depending on the great bison herd that were rapidly shrinking before the white men's guns. Initially defeated, that attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated leaving the deserted post to be burned by Indians intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence. Nonetheless, tracing did remain, and in the ashes and dirt were buried minute details of the hide men's lives and the battle that so suddenly changed them. A little more than a century later white men again dug into the sod at Adobe Walls. The nineteenth-century men dug for profits, but the modern hunters sere looking for the natural time capsule inadvertently left by those earlier adventurers. The authors of this book, a historian and an archeologists, have dug into the sod and into far-flung archives to sift reality form the long-romanticized story of Adobe Walls, its residents, and the Indians who so fiercely resented their presence. The full story of Adobe Walls now tells us much about the life and work of the hide men, about the dying of the Plains Indian culture, and about the march of white commerce across the frontier.