Westphalia Press - An imprint of the Policy Studies Organization
http://westphaliapress.org/2013/04/30/53/
L’Enfant and the Freemasons
L’Enfant and the Freemasons: H. Paul Caemmer’s The Life of Pierre Charles L’Enfant
April 30, 2013
L'Enfant and the Freemasons Final Cover FRONT Over nearly 40 years the Policy Studies Organization has published more than 300 books in partnership with a number of leading companies, including Macmillan, Lexington, and Gale. We have started our own imprint and book-publishing program, Westphalia Press. Our goal is to develop a general list that will include original titles as well as reprints of antiquarian books of interest in an entire range of subjects. We believe there is much valuable scholarship out there that deserves to be shared more widely and effectively, useful in teaching and research. |
Edited and Introduced by Guillermo De Los Reyes
The papers of Hans Paul Caemmerer (1922-1954) are deposited in the National Archives and include considerable correspondence concerning this book about Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825). It was Caemmerer who dispelled the belief that L’Enfant was an engineer, and found that he studied in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under his own father, an accomplished oil painter. L’Enfant’s big opportunity was to fill a blank canvas, physically and ideologically, of what became the capital. L’Enfant and pace, Caemmerer’s life of him, have been much cited by those who have caught a fever in terms of Washington as being of occult design.
The need or desire to connect L’Enfant’s original drawings for the city with Freemasonry relies on some still poorly researched history. Masonic meetings possibly took place in early Georgetown. Potomac Lodge in Georgetown has the enigmatic Bladensburg Bible that was published in Edinburgh in 1754. Stories recorded long afterwards claimed the book was used for pre Revolutionary Masonic rituals. Since Freemasonry teaches that one reason for belonging is to enable travel in foreign lands, Freemasons befriending each other in earliest Georgetown is a pleasant, but unsubstantiated conjecture.
By policystudiesorganization in Available, Books, Kindle on April 30, 2013.
About the Author
GUILLERMO DE LOS REYES is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. He is the author of Herencias Secretas: Masonería, política y sociedad en México (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2009). He holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.A. and B.A. from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla.
Further Reading:
Craftyness - Obelisks, Statutes & Plots: The 'Master' Planned Community
