The best introductions to the historic setting of our architecture and civilization are the local guide-books and histories. See, for example, Stokes’s excellent and exhaustive Iconography of Manhattan, and the Memorial History of Boston, edited by Justin Winsor. Both are profusely illustrated. In the wave of civic enthusiasm that swept over the country in the ’nineties, many local descriptions and histories were written. For the most part, they are loose, rambling, credulous, and devoid of sociological insight: but occasionally there is a nugget in the matrix. Powell’s Historic Towns series covers broad ground. As regional histories, Weeden’s Economic and Social History of New England, and Mr. Samuel Eliot Morison’s Maritime History of Massachusetts, stand in a class by themselves: in them we have the beginnings of what W. H. Riehl called a “natural history” of the human community. II ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY Ever since colonial architecture was reappreciated after the Civil War, a large amount of material has appeared on the early architecture of the colonies. Before 1900 the greater part of this was uncritical. Isham and Brown’s work on the early architecture of Connecticut and Rhode Island made a new departure, which Messrs. Cousins and Riley’s studies of the architecture of Salem and Philadelphia have carried on. Mr. Fiske Kimball’s compendious study of the Domestic Architecture of the Colonies and the Early Republic brings together a large amount of authenticated data. Articles and illustrations dealing with particular aspects of our pre-industrial architecture, or with particular regions--like the Lebanon Valley in Pennsylvania--are scattered through the architectural periodicals. Beyond the early republican period, our architectural histories come to an end. Works like John Bullock’s The American Cottage Builder, New York: 1854, occur in almost every old library and are full of interesting data. To fill the gap in later years we must have recourse to a comprehensive German treatise, Das Amerikanische Haus, by F. R. Vogel, Berlin: 1910. This may be supplemented by Homes in City and Country, by Russell Sturgis, J. W. Root and others, New York: 1893. III BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Where formal description leaves off, the biographies of our principal architects enter. The following books traverse in order the entire period from the Revolution to the present generation. Samuel McIntire: His Life and Work. F. Cousins and P. M. Riley, Boston: 1916. The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch. Ellen Susan Bulfinch, New York: 1896. The Journal of Latrobe. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, New York: 1905. Henry Hobson Richardson. Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, Boston: 1888. Charles Follen McKim. A. H. Granger, Boston: 1913. Daniel H. Burnham. Charles Moore, New York: 1921. The Autobiography of an Idea. Louis H. Sullivan, New York: 1924. IV CONTEMPORARY WORK