I grew up Grant because Ulysses was too dangerous a name to call a kid in the 1950s, when conformity ruled, and Ulysses S. Grant's reputation was in the toilet. My given name Ulysses, however, ended up defining me as I was coming out in the early 1970s, altering my relationship with the world. On my father's side, an Alsatian immigrant to Colonial New York and, on my mother's, a Puritan dissenter seeking freedom on the Mayflower, added romance to my bland Leave it to Beaver life in Syracuse, New York in the 1960s.\nMy world was a snapshot of prosperous, suburban Post-War America for a baker's dozen of years, until two of my siblings died and I realized, at sixteen, that I was gay.\nThe distillation of the lives of all those people who preceded me is the story of a baby boomer and a child of Stonewall; a Yalie who marched for gay pride in the 1970s, survived the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, adopted children in the 1990s, and finally married his Jewish partner of thirty-eight years in the twenty-first century.\nThe people who made me who I am today are always on my mind. They danced on the edge of the Gilded Age after the Civil War and helped define the American dream for three centuries. Among them were farmers, leather tanners, inventors, slaveowners, abolitionists, soldiers, industrialists, politicians, lawyers, a Nobel Prize winner, a president and even a princess. They're all there in me. My story is their story, yet entirely my own.

Growing Up Grant: A Gay Life in the Shadow of Ulysses S. Grant

Biographies & Memoirs

Dietz, Ulysses Grant

Regional U.S.

Ulysses Grant Dietz

Since childhood, nature has always been important to Paul Stankard, and now as the world's leading glass paperweight artist, this interest has become the defining signature of his work. Flowers such as roses, lilacs, and orchids are depicted as are a host of fantasy flowers that the artist creates in his studio, located in southern New Jersey. To look at a Stankard paperweight is to be momentarily fooled into believing that the artist has preserved a living flower in glass, when, in fact, he has created one entirely from spun filaments. Words, too, play a role, again reinforcing natural processes. Here the artist creates mosaic word canes, spelling out words like seed, wet, and scent, to name a few, which he then embeds in his floral creations. A more complex application of Stankard's paperweight skill is the formation of what the artist calls botanicals, which are upright cloistered glass objects, sometimes in diptych and triptych formations. In Paul Stankard: Homage to Nature, decorative arts curator Ulysses Grant Dietz writes with ease and affection about this gregarious, immensely talented artist. More than 180 photographs by fine arts photographer John Bigelow Taylor display close to 200 paperweights and botanicals made by Paul Stankard. Also included are photographs showing the actual preparation and assembly of the flowers, root people, and insects encased in glass. No other glass art book has ever shown a glass artist's process of creation as it is depicted here.

Paul J. Stankard: Homage to Nature

History

Harry N. Abrams

Today it s the most famous building in the world, recognizable to millions as a symbol of the American presidency. But the White House was not always an iconic monument it was first an American home. From 1800 until 1960, the president s house kept pace with changing ideals of the perfect American house and garden. It began as George Washington s dream of a country estate; a century later, when robber-baron palaces came into fashion, it became the imperial seat of the larger-than-life Theodore Roosevelt. In the 1950s, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower enjoyed the middle-class life in the capital city, barbequing on the roof of the curving south portico. That ended when Jacqueline Kennedy redecorated the White House as a museum to upper-class taste. Dream House: The White House as an American Home looks at the president s house in the context of American house design and decoration. Hundreds of historic photographs, plans, and drawings compare the president s residence to other American houses, gardens, and interiors, showing the White House as it changed through decades of interior renovation, rebuilding, and landscaping. The nation s finest decorators, garden designers, architects, and retailers Herter Brothers, Sister Parish, Beatrix Farrand, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and McKim, Mead &amp; White helped first families realize personal, and yet always American, dreams of how presidents should live. As Americans we think we know the White House, from the Red, Green, and Blue rooms to the Oval Office. What we know is only part of a much bigger story . . .

Dream House: The White House As an American Home

Arts & Photography

Watters, Sam

Architecture

Acanthus Pr Llc

This catalogue presents the evolution of the Newark Museum’s jewelry collection, showcasing prime examples that document the makers, styles, and craftsmanship, both antique and contemporary. The museum began collecting jewelry in 1911 when Archibald Mercer donated two antique gold watches, and over the years generations of old Newark families have contributed to the museum’s holdings. What started out in the 1990s as a collection focused on the products of Newark’s jewelry industry has developed into what is today one of the most comprehensive jewelry holdings in the country, including ancient, African, Asian, European, and American jewelry.Offering a rich sampling of the jewelry from the extensive Decorative Arts collection at the Newark Museum, this volume reflects on the wide array of materials people have used over the centuries―from pebbles to precious stones and metals to glass, enamel, and plastic―to create beautiful works that transcend personal adornment and become pieces of art.

Jewelry: From Pearls to Platinum to Plastic

History & Criticism

Newark Museum

Desmond Beckwith is back. He’s handsome, he’s rich, he’s gay. And he’s looking for a house in Jersey. Desmond, you see, is a vampire. He has a job he loves; he can get blood whenever he needs it. But he thinks he wants a family, and that can get complicated when you’re nearly 300 years old and don’t know how to drive. Fourteen years after Ulysses Grant Dietz (great-great-grandson of Ulysses S. Grant) published his popular first novel, Desmond, the long-awaited sequel has appeared through Amazon Kindle Books, under the banner of Lightbane Publications. Vampire in Suburbia picks up the story of Desmond Beckwith fifteen years after events of the first book. In the wake of 9-11 he’s moved his financial firm out of lower Manhattan and into a new office tower in downtown Newark. As his current life cycle winds down and he regenerates once more to the age of 21, the age when he first became a vampire in 1745, Desmond needs to rebuild the life he had, a life that had become—for the first time in centuries—filled with people who are important to him. He yearns for something more than the opulent seclusion of his flat in New York. Looking for a place to call home in the suburban greenbelt outside of Newark, he revisits people and places from past lifetimes, and meets a handsome bearded museum curator who stirs up emotions that Desmond thought had been carefully packed away. Desmond Beckwith has always been an outsider. With the support of his friend of many lifetimes, Roger Deland, Desmond has managed to maintain his privacy and his fortune; but at the cost of meaningful human contact beyond the blood he needs to survive. Desmond realizes, this time around, that there’s got to be more to life than money, blood and anonymous sex. And he hopes he’ll find it in suburbia.

Vampire in Suburbia: A Sequel to Desmond

Literature & Fiction

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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