Buffalo, New York in the context of "George Catlin"

Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House, and the last to be neither a Democrat nor a Republican. A former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Fillmore was elected vice president in 1848, and succeeded to the presidency when Zachary Taylor died in 1850. Fillmore was instrumental in passing the Compromise of 1850, which led to a brief truce in the battle over the expansion of slavery.

Fillmore was born into poverty in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. He had little formal schooling, but studied to become a lawyer. Fillmore became prominent in the Buffalo area as an attorney and politician, and was elected to the New York Assembly in 1828 and the House of Representatives in 1832. Fillmore initially belonged to the Anti-Masonic Party, but became a member of the Whig Party as it formed in the mid-1830s. He was a rival for the state party leadership with Thurlow Weed and his protégé William H. Seward. Throughout his career, Fillmore declared slavery evil but said it was beyond the federal government's power to end it. Conversely, Seward argued that the federal government had a role to play. Fillmore was an unsuccessful candidate for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives when the Whigs took control of the chamber in 1841, but was made chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Defeated in bids for the Whig nomination for vice president and for New York governor in 1844, Fillmore was elected Comptroller of New York in 1847, the first to hold that post by election.

New York, also called New York State, is a state in the northeastern United States. Bordered by the New England states to the east, Canada to the north, and Pennsylvania and New Jersey to the south, its territory extends into both the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. New York is the fourth-most populous state in the United States, with nearly 20 million residents, and the 27th-largest state by area, with a total area of 54,556 square miles (141,300 km).

New York has a varied geography. The southeastern part of the state, known as Downstate, encompasses New York City, the most populous city in the United States; Long Island, with approximately 40% of the state's population, the nation's most populous island; and the cities, suburbs, and wealthy enclaves of the lower Hudson Valley. These areas are the center of the expansive New York metropolitan area and account for approximately two-thirds of the state's population. The larger Upstate area spreads from the Great Lakes to Lake Champlain and includes the Adirondack Mountains and the Catskill Mountains (part of the wider Appalachian Mountains). The east–west Mohawk River Valley bisects the more mountainous regions of Upstate and flows into the north–south Hudson River valley near the state capital of Albany. Western New York, home to the cities of Buffalo and Rochester, is part of the Great Lakes region and borders Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Central New York is anchored by the city of Syracuse; between the central and western parts of the state, New York is prominently featured by the Finger Lakes, a popular tourist destination. To the south, along the state border with Pennsylvania, the Southern Tier sits atop the Allegheny Plateau, representing some of the northernmost reaches of Appalachia.

Sidney J. Parnes (January 5, 1922 – August 19, 2013) was an American academic who was professor at Buffalo State University (located in Buffalo, New York) and the co-founder of the International Center for Studies in Creativity. The center is housed within Buffalo State University, one of the few places in the world that offers a Master's of Science degree in creativity. The department also now offers a distance learning version of the degree to students around the world as well as an undergraduate minor in creative studies.

Parnes was a lifetime trustee of the Creative Education Foundation (CEF). He joined the CEF in 1955 to help develop a comprehensive educational program for the Creative Problem Solving Institute, which is the world's longest-running international creativity conference. In 1966, CEF's founder, Alex Osborn died, leaving Parnes to head the foundation.

Lake Erie (/ˈɪri/ EER-ee) is the fourth-largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and also has the shortest average water residence time. At its deepest point, Lake Erie is 210 feet (64 m) deep, making it the only Great Lake whose deepest point is above sea level.

Located on the International Boundary between Canada and the United States, Lake Erie's northern shore is the Canadian province of Ontario, specifically the Ontario Peninsula, with the U.S. states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York on its western, southern, and eastern shores. These jurisdictions divide the surface area of the lake with water boundaries. The largest city on the lake is Cleveland, anchoring the third largest U.S. metro area in the Great Lakes region, after Greater Chicago and Metro Detroit. Other major cities along the lake shore include Buffalo, New York; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Toledo, Ohio.

Upstate New York is a geographic region of New York State that lies north and northwest of the New York City metropolitan area of downstate New York. Upstate includes the middle and upper Hudson Valley, the Capital District, the Mohawk Valley region, Central New York, the Southern Tier, the Finger Lakes region, Western New York, and the North Country. Major cities across upstate New York from east to west include the state capital of Albany, Utica, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.

Before the European colonization of the Americas, the region of upstate New York was populated by several Native American tribes. It was home to the Iroquois Confederacy, an indigenous confederation of six tribes, known as the Six Nations. Henry Hudson made the first recorded European exploration of the region in 1609, and the Dutch erected Fort Orange (present-day Albany) in 1624, which was the first permanent European settlement in New York. The region saw many battles during the American Revolutionary War, with the Iroquois split between supporters of the loyalists and supporters of the revolutionaries. After the war ended, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix kicked off a series of treaties and purchases that saw the Iroquois cede the vast majority of their land in upstate New York to the newly formed United States.

The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east–west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the upper Great Lakes above Niagara Falls, vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians. The Erie Canal accelerated the settlement of the Great Lakes region, the westward expansion of the United States, and the economic ascendancy of New York state.

A canal from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes was first proposed in the 1780s, but a formal survey was not conducted until 1808. The New York State Legislature authorized construction in 1817. Political opponents of the canal (referencing its lead supporter New York Governor DeWitt Clinton) denigrated the project as "Clinton's Folly" and "Clinton's Big Ditch". Nonetheless, the canal saw quick success upon opening on October 26, 1825, with toll revenue covering the state's construction debt within the first year of operation. The westward connection gave New York City a strong advantage over all other US ports and brought major growth to canal cities such as Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.

Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.

Olmsted's projects encompassed comprehensive park systems, planned communities, and institutional campuses across North America. His major works included the country's first coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and parks for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He designed one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois, and created master plans for universities including University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Notable individual projects included the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec, and landscape work for the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Calvert Vaux FAIA (/vɔːks/; December 20, 1824 – November 19, 1895) was an English-American architect and landscape designer. He and his protégé Frederick Law Olmsted designed parks such as Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City and the Delaware Park–Front Park System in Buffalo, New York.

Vaux, on his own and in various partnerships, designed and created dozens of parks across the northeastern United States, most famously in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Buffalo in New York. He introduced new ideas about the significance of public parks in America during a hectic time of urbanization. This industrialization of the cityscape inspired Vaux to focus on the integration of buildings, bridges, and other forms of architecture into their natural surroundings. He favored naturalistic and curvilinear lines in his designs.