Nature: From Howling Wilderness to Vacation Destination January 15, 2013

The Rockwell Museum of Western Art will present a lecture by Charles Mitchell, Ph.D. on Nature: From Howling Wilderness to Vacation Destination. This Speakers in the Humanities event, which is free and open to the public, is made possible through the support of the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Charles Mitchell, Associate Professor of American Studies, has been on the faculty at Elmira College since 1993. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Lynbrook, Long Island, he still occasionally refers to everything north of Yonkers as "upstate." He teaches a wide variety of courses in American cultural history, with specific interests in environmental history, the history of ideas about nature, and the representation of the landscape in literature and art. Drawing on landscape paintings, photography, travelers' accounts, and other sources, Dr. Mitchell will explore the evolution of American attitudes towards nature. Beginning with perceptions of the American landscape as a howling wilderness, a wasteland to be tamed and transformed, he will trace the social, cultural and economic forces that led to the perception of wild nature as something of value to be experienced and preserved. Key topics and figures to be discussed are the sublime, romanticism, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Ansel Adams whose work is represented in the Rockwell Museum of Western Art collection, as well as John Muir, and The Lorax.