
The authors have uncovered and remedied innumerable gaps and errors in standard reference works. They have also brought to light new information about thousands of forgotten men and women, once well known in their communities, who achieved success in either the fine arts or the decorative and "practical" arts of photograph, ornamental penmanship, tombstone carving, china painting, illustrating, cartooning, and the execution of panoramas and theatrical scenery.
More than 13,000 entries are filled with factual details that will be indispensable to art scholars, genealogists, museum professionals, and historians, as well as to private and institutional collectors of American paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs, and anyone with an interest in the local and regional history of the nineteenth-century Midwest. Each entry is documented, cross-referenced, and backed up by two bibliographies and an appendix devoted to art organizations, schools, major expositions, and collaborative works.
| wendy body peter straub t a banks yolanda celbridge henry elliot malden | thomas eiter murray smith andy stanley angelina samaroo r a brualdi |