“Sherow and Charlton have taken on a very ambitious project of great historical importance: retracing the photographs of America’s heartland made by the nineteenth-century railroad photographer Alexander Gardner. With painstaking research and tremendous skill Charlton has relocated the camera positions of some of the first photographs of Kansas and the Midwest and made new photographs of the contemporary landscape. The results connect the past to the present, recording over a century of change and cultural intervention. This book is an outstanding example of rephotographic art combined with compelling and thought-provoking historical analysis.”—Mark Klett, coauthor of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe
“The value of this book is that it exposes us to a different interpretation of the frontier, one that forces us to recognize the realities of early but uncompromising corporate power.”—Kansas History
“A fascinating re-look at Kansas and the grasslands, viewed not only through the camera lens but also through the less tangible, yet still revealing, historical lenses of technology, conquest, environmental change, and time.”—Julie Courtwright, author of Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History
