Tony Horwitz on Frederick Law Olmsted: Spying on the South, An Odyssey Across the American Divide

In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #242 | Guest: Tony Horwitz | Show Summary: It has been twenty years since Tony Horwitz's bestselling Confederates in the Attic brought America's modern North-South divide into the light, inviting readers on a trek through Civil War country.
Now Horwitz retraces the footsteps of a New York Times correspondent who went South as a "spy" for the paper, a full decade before the War. Horwitz traces the route of sleuthing correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted; like Olmsted, collecting as he goes the voices and impressions that informed spectrums of race, money, politics, and power in the pre-war era. Olmsted was driven by what he learned to create spaces welcoming to all, culminating in his landscape design for Central Park.
Horwitz, in his turn, has written Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. He probes Olmsted's travels and dispatches looking for lessons for today's brutally divided America. Two journeys, more than a century apart, illuminate our current divide.