Patrick Lee Lucas Celebrates New Book Publication

University Press of Kentucky recently announced the publication of a new book authored by Patrick Lee Lucas, entitled, “Interiors Athens on the Frontier: Grecian-Style Architecture in the Splendid Valley of the West, 1820-1860.”

In the book, Lucas examines the material culture of Grecian-style buildings in antebellum America to help recover nineteenth-century regional identities. As communities worked to define their built landscape and develop a shared Western identity, Lucas’s study invites readers to question many of the assumptions Americans have made about divisions and cultural formation in antebellum society.

Said Dr. Paul A. Manoguerra, Director and Curator of the Jundt Art Museum, “Athens on the Frontier offers a much-needed American Studies and material culture approach to an understanding of all the Grecian-style buildings constructed on the frontier, both North and South, of the antebellum United States. Mixing intellectual history, architectural history, and an enjoyable prose, Patrick Lee Lucas establishes, through example after example, how the near-ubiquitous use of the Grecian-style in the trans-Appalachian West constructed a cultural unity rooted in associates to the ancient past while making a statement about future prospects. Meanwhile, Lucas invites us all to reflect on both our historic and our current built environment, and its ongoing cultural meaning.”