Great masters of landscape painting, from the French of Emile Michel ... With one hundered and seventy reproductions and forty photogravure plates

Carter of the Stanford Research Institute, "from being virtually infinite in the days of caves to ... approximately a hundred years for houses built in United States colonial days, to about forty years at present." And Michael Wood, an English writer comments: The American "... made his world yesterday, and he knows exactly how fragile, how shifting it is. Buildings in New York literally disappear overnight, and the face of a city can change completely in a year." Novelist Louis Auchincloss complains angrily that "The horror of living in New York is living in a city without a history ... All eight of my great-grandparents lived in the city ... and only one of the houses they lived in ... is still standing. That's what I mean by the vanishing past." Less patrician New Yorkers, whose ancestors landed in America more recently, arriving there from the barrios of Puerto Rico, the villages of Eastern Europe or the plantations of the South, might voice their feelings quite differently. Yet the "Vanishing past" is a real phenomenon, and it is likely to become far more widespread, engulfing even many of the history-drenched cities of Europe ...»