Myths and Legends of Our Own Land - Complete

Myths and Legends of Our Own Land - Complete gathers the spectral, heroic, and etiological tales by which nineteenth-century Americans imagined their landscape: haunted houses, Indian traditions, colonial marvels, Revolutionary memories, and local explanations for mountains, rivers, and towns. Skinner‘s prose is compact, antiquarian, and richly atmospheric, blending newspaper vividness with the cadences of romance. Published in an era eager to discover a national folklore comparable to Europe‘s, the collection preserves regional materials while also revealing the assumptions and racial vocabularies of its time. Charles Montgomery Skinner (1852-1907) was a New York journalist, editor, essayist, and popularizer of local history, long associated with the Brooklyn Eagle. His professional habits-collecting anecdote, shaping archives into readable narrative, and attending to place as social memory-plainly informed this book. Writing amid post-Civil-War nation-building and rapid modernization, Skinner sought to give American scenery a storied depth, even when his retellings reflect contemporary romanticism more than ethnographic precision. Readers interested in American folklore, regionalism, Gothic anecdote, or the cultural construction of national memory will find this volume rewarding. It is best read both as an engaging treasury of legends and as a historical document of how the United States learned to mythologize itself.