Addison Mizner’s Mediterranean-style mansions are much-admired Florida icons, where even today you can find many homes modeled with stucco walls and tiled roofs. In the paperback release of Boca Rococo, Caroline Seebohm’s successful biography on the flamboyant architect is more accessible now than ever as it reaches more readers interested in the man himself. Mizner had global experience from San Francisco to China during his early days, before landing in New York and eventually, South Florida. He had no formal training but did possess natural talent, establishing him as architect of the rich and famous. His designs made the city of Palm Beach one of America’s most elegant resort spots—and fed his dream of developing a “Venice-on-the-Ocean” in nearby Boca Raton. Mizner’s plans ended with the collapse of Florida’s real estate boom. He died in 1933, broken and bankrupt. With inspiration from and inclusion of never-before-seen material like floor plans and autobiographical works, and a new foreword written by the author, Seebohm gives readers a complete view of Mizner as one of the greatest architects and more flamboyant Americans.

In words and photographs, the story of visionary architect Addison Mizner * Introduced the Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles to southern Florida * Designed and developed the resort town of Boca Raton * Designed the exquisite Everglades Club in Palm Beach Addison Mizner transformed Palm Beach and South Florida with his visionary architecture. He designed, among many others, the landmark Everglades Club in Palm Beach and the Boca Raton Resort and Club in Boca Raton. In this detailed biography, Stephen Perkins and James Caughman examine Mizner's life and origins, and explore how the events of his life influenced his marvelous architectural legacy.

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression. The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a Vegas: gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now. In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses. Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the decade: the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.

The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.

Interior Design Masters contains 300 biographical entries of people who have significantly impacted design. They are the people, historical and contemporary, that students and practitioners should know. Coverage starts in the late Renaissance, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book has five sections, with the entries alphabetical in each, so it can serve as a history textbook and a reference guide. The seventeeth- and eighteenth-century section covers figures from Thomas Chippendale to Horace Walpole. The nineteenth-century section includes William Morris and Candace Wheeler. The early twentieth-century section presents modernism’s design heroes, including Marcel Breuer, Eileen Gray, and Gilbert Rohde. The post-World War II designers range from Madeleine Castaing to Raymond Loewy. The final contemporary section includes Ron Arad and the Bouroullec brothers. These are the canonical figures who belong to any design history. The book also contains less well-known figures who deserve attention, such as Betty Joel, the British art deco furniture designer; Paul Veysseyre, the Frenchman active in China in the 1930s; and more recently Lanzavecchia-Wai, the Italian-Singaporean duo whose work ranges from health care to helicopters. Global in its coverage, the book is richly illustrated with over 600 black-and-white and color photographs.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the “Black Legend,” which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt—California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida—there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain’s political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.

Commemorating Juan Ponce de León’s landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. The contributors, leading experts in a range of fields, begin with an examination of the first and second Spanish periods. This was a time when La Florida was an elusive possession that the Spaniards were never able to completely secure; but Spanish influence would nonetheless leave an indelible mark on the land. In the second half of this volume, the essays highlight the Hispanic cultural legacy, politics, and history of modern Florida, and expand on Florida’s role as a modern Trans-Atlantic cross roads. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida’s past and present and will assuredly shape its future.

In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors, showing the astonishing paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and other avant garde artists. Young American artists quickly responded by experimenting with impressionism, cubism, and abstraction. In Monumental Dreams, author Caroline Seebohm tells the riveting story of how Ann Norton (1905–1982)—a child of the South who had eschewed her Alabama roots to become a sculptor in New York City—joined this new guard. She studied with John Hovannes and Jose de Creeft and was studio assistant to Alexander Archipenko. Her work was well received, and by age 35, she had already participated in group shows at MOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite her burgeoning career, Norton found New York a difficult place to live. In search of paying work, she moved to Florida, where she became a teacher at the Norton Gallery and School of Art, founded by retired Acme Steel president Ralph Hubbard Norton. The two built a relationship based on love as well as common aesthetic values, and after his death, she built her finest and lasting work. Today, her monolithic sculptures—in the spirit of Stonehenge, Henry Moore, and Buddhist temple art—can be admired in the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens.

From the Potomac to the Gulf, artists were creating in the South even before it was recognized as a region. The South has contributed to America's cultural heritage with works as diverse as Benjamin Henry Latrobe's architectural plans for the nation's Capitol, the wares of the Newcomb Pottery, and Richard Clague's tonalist Louisiana bayou scenes. This comprehensive volume shows how, through the decades and centuries, the art of the South expanded from mimetic portraiture to sophisticated responses to national and international movements. The essays treat historic and current trends in the visual arts and architecture, major collections and institutions, and biographies of artists themselves. As leading experts on the region's artists and their work, editors Judith H. Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington frame the volume's contributions with insightful overview essays on the visual arts and architecture in the American South.