The College of Arts and Sciences invites you to the 2016-2017 Full Professor Lecture Series. The third lecture in the series, “Benton MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail Regional Plan: The Forgotten Columbia Valley Cross-Section," will be given by Robert McCullough, Professor, Department of History, on Monday, January 30, at 4:00 p.m. in the Waterman Memorial Lounge.
 
The centennial of Benton MacKaye’s proposal for the Appalachian Trail (AT), published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921, is approaching.  MacKaye’s complex plan represented a radical effort to use the undeveloped Appalachian region as a strategic battle line against encroaching civilization.  Both MacKaye and his friend, architect Clarence Stein, viewed that article as only a sketch of their regional vision, and in 1923 the pair crafted a cross-sectional model of the AT regional plan in the Columbia Valley of northwestern New Jersey.  That forgotten sample, explained by MacKaye in a 1924 manuscript, is crucial to any full understanding of the 1921 proposal.
 
Robert McCullough is a professor in the University of Vermont’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation.  He writes about American landscape history and is the author of several books that touch that topic in numerous ways, including The Landscape of Community: A History of Communal Forests in New England and Old Wheelways: Traces of Bicycle History on the Land.  This lecture is drawn from his 2012 book, A Path for Kindred Spirit: The Friendship of Clarence Stein and Benton MacKaye.
 
A recording of this lecture will be made available on the College of Arts and Sciences website.   
 
The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.

More information at 656-3166