Charlottesville, VA: Thomasson-Grant & Lickle, Lickle Publishing Inc., 1996. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. The format is approximately 9.375 inches by 12.25 inches. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Illustrated endpapers. Profusely illustrated (color). Foreword by James M. McPherson. Contents include A Masterpiece of Nature, Virginia's New Frontier, Cradle of Democracy, A Killing Ground, Landscape in Peril, Organizations, Suggested Reading, and Index. Rudy Abramson was a native Appalachian, born in Florence, Ala., on Aug. 31, 1937. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1958, he became a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. He was a former longtime Washington reporter for The Times who wrote a highly praised biography of American statesman W. Averell Harriman. A staff writer in The Times’ Washington bureau from 1966 to 1993, Abramson became one of the first national reporters assigned to the space program. He covered the development of the Apollo 11 mission and the historic moon landing in 1969. He wrote two books, “Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986” (1992) and “Hallowed Ground: Preserving America’s Heritage” (1996), about the Piedmont region of northern Virginia, where some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. While working on “Hallowed Ground,” Abramson helped organize opposition to a plan by the Walt Disney Co. to build a history theme park near a key Civil War site, the Manassas Battlefield at the eastern end of the Piedmont. He helped recruit prominent writers and historians, including William Styron, Shelby Foote and C. Vann Woodward, to defeat the proposal. More