Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is best known today as the landscape architect who designed New York’s iconic Central Park. In the years before the Civil War, however, he was a travel writer and reporter for the New-York Daily Times (now the New York Times). From 1852 to 1854 he traveled through different parts of the American South, documenting his experiences in a series of dispatches that became A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country in the Winter of 1853–4 (1860). In 1861, during the first year of the Civil War, he edited and abridged those volumes into the collection Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom.