Thomas Cole

Dispatches from a spine-tingling day of visits to the places where James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Thomas Cole created their most famous works.

An unearthed guest register from the Catskill Mountain House sheds light on the artists who spent the night there.

Gravely inaccurate 19th-century depictions of the destruction of Rome are used to illustrate parallels between Rome and the U.S.

How American landscape painters, seen as old-fashioned and provincial, gained cultural power by glorifying expansionism.

In the streets of New York, we try to imagine the city as Walt Whitman, and other artists of his time, experienced it.

Why are Americans so obsessed with tornadoes? A brief tour of twister culture has the answer.

Los Angeles and its river have long been enmeshed in an epic struggle for control.

We have the Swedes and William Henry Harrison to thank for the popularization of the log cabin.