Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted’s endeavors as a Civil War journalist and head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the first years of the Civil War have been featured in the NY Times Opinionator/Disunion series twice in the past 3 months. The latest article is in today’s edition, featuring Olmsted’s map of The Cotton Kingdom and the effects of a slave-based economy. An earlier article in July described the broader body of Olmsted’s work over that period of just a few years. Olmsted considered it his greatest contribution to his country. As a Southerner, I cannot help but note this part from today’s article:
For the next several years Olmsted sent back voluminous reports — published in three volumes — of disorder, poverty, inefficiency, backwardness and chaos. We might dismiss these as hopelessly biased Northern observations, yet these accounts gained a wide audience, and challenged the contemporary picture of the cotton south as an economic powerhouse. (emphasis added)
Um, yeah. But who can defend the status quo of the times?
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 
Hi there,
You may also enjoy this article if you can gain access…
“Frederick Law Olmsted’s city parks represent a view of freedom derived from the offsetting influences of an orderly, systematic, public space. The author traces this view to the works of Francis Bacon, John Locke, Archibald Alison, Horace Bushnell, and the liberalism of nineteenth-century New England Whigs.”
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00039