Dr. Seymour Schwartz, professor of surgery at the University of Rochester, will sign copies of the 19th-century journal he edited about life in the Eastern United States at 7 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 7, at Borders Books, Music & Cafe, 30 Square Dr., in Victor, across from Eastview Mall.
An Englishman's Journey Along America's Eastern Waterways (University of Rochester Press, $24.95 cloth, 168 pages) is a fascinating reproduction of the journal and pen-and-ink drawings of Herbert Holtham, an English Unitarian minister. In the early 1830s, he traveled through parts of the Eastern United States, particularly in New York along the Erie Canal, and recorded impressions of New York's urban and rural scenes, its people, and events.
Both the journal and the drawings would have remained undiscovered had not Dr. Schwartz, an avid collector of early American maps, found them in Chicago in 1989. Along with the journal are 30 pen-and-ink drawings, including depictions of Niagara Falls, the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and seven scenes of early life in Rochester. Together, the journal and drawings provide a superior set of impressions of America in the 1830s. Schwartz, Distinguished Alumni Professor of Surgery at the University of Rochester and a resident of Pittsford, has also published The Mapping of America and The French and Indian Wars. He is a member of the boards of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution and the Philip Lee Phillips Society of the Library of Congress.