This interdisciplinary look at the cultural and architectural history of follies in America is illustrated with examples with examples from literature, the arts, and the landscape itself. Carso gives us a broad sweep using the primary model for America, the eighteen-century English landscape garden. Less concerned with style, she grapples with the meaning of this building type, one that is at once 'recreational and amusing' but also 'didactic and enlightening.(Nineteenth Century) Follies in America delves into the history of the ornamental structures, or follies, that dotted, as some still do, many a private garden, public park, rural cemetery, or site of natural beauty in the nineteenthcentury United States(Winterthur Portfolio)