John Hanson Mitchell
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Books

Legends of the Common Stream

Bright Leaf,
2021

Travels in a Vanishing Empire

Komatic Press,
2017

An Eden of Sorts

Perseus Books,
2012

The Last of the Bird People

Wilderness House Press,
2012

The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston

Beacon Press
2008

The Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica
Shoemaker & Hoard,
2007
Looking for Mr Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American
Shoemaker & Hoard,
2005

Following the Sun: Fron Spain to the Hebrides
Counterpoint,
2002

The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness
Counterpoint,
2001
Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land
Perseus Books,
1998
Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgimage in Search of Place
Perseus Books,
1995
Living at the End of Time
Houghton Mifflin,
1990

A Field Guide to your Own Backyard,
Countryman Press,
1985

Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Tousand Years on One Square Mile
Perseus Books,
1984

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“Mitchell tells a remarkable story of the discovery and authentication of a hitherto invisible African American life…. Mitchell does so with warmth and wit, and he opens our eyes to an important figure in American photography.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Looking for Mr. Gilbert:
The Reimagined Life of an African-American

Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005

In the mid 1970s, Mitchell discovered over two thousand antique glass plate negatives in the attic of an old estate in Massachusetts. At the time, he believed the photographs to be the work of William Brewster, the nineteenth-century ornithologist and conservationist. But as a result of a tip from a Harvard research assistant, Mitchell came to believe that the plates were not the work of Brewster, but of his assistant, a little-known African American named Robert Alexander Gilbert.

In his quest to uncover the story of Mr. Gilbert, Mitchell’s trail leads from the labyrinthine archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, to the countryside of Virginia; from the haunts of American expatriates in Paris, to the culturally rich world of African Americans in Boston at the turn of the last century.

With careful deconstruction of the photographic images, Mitchell makes visible this invisible man. From the investigation of the haunting photographs of landscapes and people, Robert Gilbert slowly comes into focus as a quiet, unassuming Renaissance man, a polymath who forged on in the face of social pressures and the iron ceiling of American racism.

© 2021 John Hanson Mitchell
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