A popular history of the United States of America, from the aboriginal times to the present day (1881) (14581889429)

Identifier: popularhistoryof00ridpaj (find matches)
Title: A popular history of the United States of America, from the aboriginal times to the present day
Year: 1881 (1880s)
Authors: Ridpath, John Clark, 1840-1900. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Cincinnati, Philadelphia (etc.) Jones brothers & company San Francisco, A. L. Bancroft & co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation



Text Appearing Before Image:
f his ragged and half-starvedarmy, struggled against the foe. Here to the east, spreading awayfrom the very feet of the beholder to the distant rolling Delaware,and right and left to the skirts of the horizon, slumbered under thesummer sun the old City of Penn, where in those same heroic days,now gliding dreamily into the shadows of the past, Adams and Jef-ferson and Franklin did the bravest deed in the civil history of thehuman race. Such were the thrilling associations which clusteredaround the great Centennial Building. Only one melancholy reflec-tion arose to trouble the soul of the beholder: the grand edifice wasdesigned only as a temporary structure—meant to subserve the fleetingpurposes of the International Exhibition. The building second in importance, though not in size, amongthe Centennial structures, was the Memorial Hall, or Art Gallery. Itstands upon a broad terrace in the Lansdowne Plateau, at the dis-tance of two hundred and fifty feet from the north projection of the
Text Appearing After Image:
(579) 580 HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Main Building, and a hundred and sixteen feet above the level ofthe Schuylkill. The structure is of iron, granite, and glass, and is inthat modern style of architecture called the Renaissance. The build-ing is in the form of a rectangular parallelogram, and is three hun-dred and sixty-five feet in length, two hundred and ten feet wide, andfifty-nine feet in height above a twelve-foot basement of stone. Thedome, also rectangular in form, rises a hundred and fifty feet abovethe terrace, and is surmounted with a colossal bell bearing a mag-nificent statue of the goddess America, cast in zinc, twenty-three anda half feet in height, and weighing six thousand pounds. At the fourcorners of the base of the dome are seated other statues representingthe four quarters of the globe. The floor of the main hall below hasan area of more than a half acre, and is capable of accommodatingeight thousand spectators at one time. In its architectural elementsthe buil