About the Author

Ulysses Grant Dietz, a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, has been the curator of Decorative Arts at The Newark Museum since 1980, and Senior Curator since 2007. He received his BA from Yale in 1977, and his MA in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware's Winterthur Program in 1980. Mr. Dietz restored the centerpiece of the Newark Museum, its 1885 Ballantine House. He has published numerous articles on decorative arts and books on the Museum's Studio Pottery, Art Pottery and 19th century furniture collections. Sam Watters lectures and writes on the built environment within the context of American culture. Educated at Yale, the University of Marseilles and at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, he is the author of Houses of Los Angeles, 1885-1935 and the Lost LA column for the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Watters is preparing, with the Library of Congress a book on the early 20th century garden photographs of White House photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston.