I went on this huge pilgrimage to Europe when I graduated college to try and visit as many of the panoramas as I could from this era. “I knew I wanted to make things since I was a child, and being in St Louis I learned about the 19th-century panorama tradition. According to Velas, her love of panoramas goes back to her early childhood, and getting to show her work in this exhibit alongside ephemera from panorama history is something of a full-circle moment. In addition, the show provides a rich assortment of broadsides, rare objects and ephemera from the 19th-century world of panoramas that help audiences truly get inside the creation and exhibition of these massive pieces.Ĭurating the show, Fishburne worked alongside panorama artist Sara Velas and writer Ruby Carlson, both of whom co-curate the Velaslavasay Panorama – a museum dedicated to panoramas located in nearby Los Angeles. The show centers around Forest Lawn’s Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection – which has displayed two enormous panoramas for decades – and it also offers other enormous works, like the Panorama of the Valley of the Smokes, made by artist Sara Velas in 2000. (Nov.Grand Views offers audiences a rare chance to immerse themselves in the fascinating world of panoramas. Jefferson’s critics still have something valid to say, even if their voices here are stilled. But in the end, as fine a rendering of the nation’s third president as this book may be, it comes too close to idolization. Meacham understandably holds Jefferson up as the remarkable figure he was.

While he’s fully conversant with long-held skepticism about aspects of Jefferson’s character (his dissimulation, for instance) and his stance toward slavery, Meacham gives him the benefit of the doubt throughout (on, for example, his Revolutionary War governorship of Virginia and the draconian 1807 embargo). To Meacham, who won a Pulitzer for his American Lion, Jefferson was a philosopher/politician, and “the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic.” Those words only faintly suggest the inspirational tone of the entire work. Bernstein’s Thomas Jefferson. Like David McCullough’s John Adams (to which it can be seen as a counterpart), Meacham’s book is a love letter to its subject. Another Jefferson biography (right on the heels of Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain)! Fortunately, Meacham’s is a fine work, deserving a place high on the list of long biographies of its subject even if rivaled by such shorter ones as Richard B.

The art of power jefferson