american culture

Softcover. Zach Feuer Gallery, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages. Priya Bhatnagar in Flash Art has written "Threatening to unravel pop culture's abstractions, Hawkins's images call into question the socially coded nature of its identities, icons, meanings and values while contesting its homogenization of beauty and fashion. Joel Sternfeld's foreword calls this survey of recent work "an achievement of the first magnitude." Inviting friends and strangers in Nepal to pose for the camera, Blue Eyes includes three photographic series and three video projects that reveal the ubiquity of American media culture while underscoring certain behaviors as they pertain to global capitalism and race. Each image investigates the experience of cultural imperialism as seen through the eyes of those living in the developing world. Hawkins highlights the visual dialogue that comprises consumer and popular culture and asks the viewer to consider a world of differences increasingly veiled by surface similarities.

Softcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois Press, 2nd Ed., 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 226 pages. The important role of the Temperance movement throughout American history is analyzed as clashes and conflicts between rival social systems, cultures, and status groups. Sometimes the "dry" is winning the classic battle for prestige and political power. Sometimes, as in today's society, he is losing. This significant contribution to the theory of status conflict also discloses the importance of political acts as symbolic acts and offers a dramatistic theory of status politics, Gusfield provides a useful addition to the economic and psychological modes of analysis current in the study of political and social movements. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1st US, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 190 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Clean, tight copy. The documentary style that dominates American photography had its origins in the social reform publicity campaigns of the turn of the century. This book traces the history of this genre and its main participants, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Bloomsbury , 1st US, 2004-07-02, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 260 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A riveting and superbly illustrated account of the enigmatic House Beautiful editor's profound influence on mid-century American taste From 1941 to 1964, House Beautiful magazine's crusading editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon introduced and promoted her vision of "good design" and "better living" to an extensive middle-class American readership. Her innovative magazine-sponsored initiatives, including House Beautiful's Pace Setter House Program and the Climate Control Project, popularized a "livable" and decidedly American version of postwar modern architecture. Gordon's devotion to what she called the American Style attracted the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who became her ally and collaborator. Gordon's editorial programs reshaped ideas about American living and, by extension, what consumers bought, what designers made, and what manufacturers brought to market. This incisive assessment of Gordon's influence as an editor, critic, and arbiter of domestic taste reflects more broadly on the cultures of consumption and identity in postwar America. Nearly 200 images are featured, including work by Ezra Stoller, Maynard Parker, and Julius Shulman. This important book champions an often-neglected source--the consumer magazine--as a key tool for deepening our understanding of mid-century architecture and design.

Hardcover. Washington, Government Printing Office, 1st, 1893, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 822 pages, b&w illustrations, several color plates. Olive green cloth covers w/ gilt lettering on spine, gilt design of Native American bust on front cover. Clear plastic dust jacket. Light wear to edges and corners; rubbing to rear cover. Rear hinge cracked and separating. Foxing to edges. Else pages clean and tight.

Hardcover. London, Art / Books Publishing, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. A tight copy. Terence Donovan was one of the foremost photographers of his generation--among the greatest Britain has ever produced. He came to prominence in London as part of a postwar renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography, and--alongside David Bailey and Brian Duffy (photographers of a similar working-class background)--he captured and helped create the Swinging London of the 1960s. Donovan socialized with celebrities and royalty, and found himself elevated to stardom in his own right, and yet, despite his success and status, there has never been a serious evaluation of Donovan's fashion work: he allowed no monographs to be published during his lifetime. Terence Donovan Fashion is therefore the first publication of his fashion photographs. Arranged chronologically, and with an illuminating text by Robin Muir (ex-picture editor of Vogue), the book considers Donovan in the social and cultural context of his time, showing how his constant experimentation not only set him apart, but also influenced generations to come. Designed by former art director of Nova magazine and Pentagram partner David Hillman, and with images selected by Hillman, the artist's widow Diana Donovan and Grace Coddington, creative director of American Vogue, this volume is indisputably a landmark publication in the history of fashion photography.

Hardcover. Lubbock TX, Texas Tech University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 212 pages, 132 b&w photos by J. Marcus Weekley. Documents the dance hall culture across the state.

Hardcover. Knoxville, University Of Tennessee Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 432 pages. Shields shows how both the myth of Adam and the myth of Aeneas, in crossing over to America from Europe, dynamically intermingled in the thought of the earliest American writers. This rearticulation of the myths of Adam and Aeneas became peculiarly adapted to the demands of the American adventure in freedom. Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical roots of our culture can allay the American fear of "pastlessness" that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has generated. The authors probing analysis sheds new light on the works of such seminal figures as Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Phillis Wheatley, George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

Hardcover. Gottingen GR, Steidl, 6th pr., 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A fine copy in a near fine dust wrapper. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter, cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 75 years ago. A beautiful copy with Steidl kigh quality reproductions.

Softcover. NY, Pantheon, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter--cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 75 years ago. This edition was printed in Switzerland by Jean Genoud under the direst supervision of Robert Frank. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. Harvey Kurtzman discovered Robert Crumb and gave Gloria Steinem her first job in publishing when he hired her as his assistant. Terry Gilliam also started at his side, met an unknown John Cleese in the process, and the genesis of Monty Python was formed. Art Spiegelman has stated on record that he owes his career to him. And he's one of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's favorite artists.Harvey Kurtzman had a Midas touch for talent, but was himself an astonishingly talented and influential artist, writer, editor, and satirist. The creator of MAD and Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny" was called, "One of the most important figures in postwar America" by the New York Times. Kurtzman's groundbreaking "realistic" war comics of the early '50s and various satirical publications (MAD, Trump, Humbug, and Help!) had an immense impact on popular culture, inspiring a generation of underground cartoonists. Without Kurtzman, it's unlikely we'd have had Airplane, SNL, or National Lampoon.The Art of Harvey Kurtzman is the first and only authorized celebration of this "Master of American Comics." This definitive book includes hundreds of never-before-seen illustrations, paintings, pencil sketches, newly discovered lost E.C. Comics layouts, color compositions, illustrated correspondence, and vintage photos from the rich Kurtzman archives

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2024, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages illustrated in color. An exploration of late nineteenth-century American literary posters. a vibrant genre at the vanguard of modern commercial art and graphic design spurred by innovations in printing technology, the modern poster emerged in the 1890s as a popular form of visual culture in the United States. Created by some of the best-known illustrators and graphic designers of the period including Will H. Bradley, Florence Lundborg, Edward Penfield, and Ethel Reed these advertisements for books and high-tone periodicals such as Harper's and Lippincott's went beyond the realm of commercial art, incorporating bold, stylized imagery and striking typography. This book, based on the renowned Leonard A. Lauder Collection, explores the craze for literary posters, which became sought after collectibles even in their day. It offers new scholarly perspectives that address the aesthetic sophistication and modernity of the literary poster; the impact of early experiments in the field of advertising psychology; the expanded opportunities for women artists, who played an important role in advancing the so-called poster style; and the printmaking techniques that artists employed in this novel art form. A lively survey of a little-known but highly influential period in graphic design,

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 397 pages illustrated in color. This new volume in Fantagraphics' and Marvel's collaborative Atlas Library presents Girl Comics #1-12, a long unseen subversion of romance comics beautifully designed for a new generation of readers!In 1950, Timely/Atlas/Marvel took a typical romance title called Girl Comics and turned it into a sister companion to its successful men's-adventure comics: an empowering girls'-adventure comic! Mystery, adventure and suspense was promised and delivered! At the hands of a stellar artistic line-up, including John Buscema, Mike Sekowsky, Bill Everett, Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, and Bernard Krigstein, Girl Comics evolved from heart-stricken love stories to hair-raising girl-power thrill rides like "The Death Plunge!," "The House of Shadows!," "I was a Murderer's Daughter!," "They Called me a Spy!," "The Dead Hands at the Controls," and "The Dark Hallway."This volume also features the story behind the stories, with editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo's essays on Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's enthusiastic relationship with romance comics and magazines at a time when the art form was cementing itself into American youth culture! Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this daring reexamination of the connections between national politics and Hollywood movies, Lary May offers a fresh interpretation of American culture from the New Deal through the Cold War and one in which a populist, egalitarian ethos found itself eventually supplanted by a far different view of the nation. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, One World/Ballantine, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A fictional narrative base on the life of America's first black female millionaire. Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America's first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes. Renowned author Alex Haley became fascinated by the story of this extraordinary heroine, and before his death in 1992 he embarked on the research and outline of a major novel based on her life. Now with The Black Rose, critically acclaimed writer Tananarive Due brings the work to inspiring completion. "I got my start by giving myself a start," Madam C.J. was fond of saying as she recounted her transformation from the uneducated laundress Sarah Breedlove to a woman of wealth, culture, and celebrity. Madam C.J. was nearing forty and married to a maverick Denver newspaperman when the wonder-working hair care method she discovered changed her life. Seemingly overnight, she built a marketing empire that enlisted more than twenty thousand bright young African American women to demonstrate and sell her products door-to-door. By the time she died in 1919, Madam C.J. Walker had constructed her own factory from the ground up, established a training school, and built a twenty-room mansion at Irvington on the Hudson, New York, called Villa Lawaro.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 156 pages. In the early 1940s as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influence in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region's support for the Allies while portraying Brazil and its neighbors as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to Brazil in 1940 by Rockefeller's agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich--a stunning collection of over a thousand photographs that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history. Accompanied by analysis from Robert M. Levine, this selection of Naylor's photographs offers a unique view of everyday life during one of modern Brazil's least-examined decades. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The colonists who settled the backcountry in eighteenth-century New England were recruited from the social fringe, people who were desperate for land, autonomy, and respectability and who were willing to make a hard living in a rugged environment. Mark Williams' microhistorical approach gives voice to the settlers, proprietors, and officials of the small colonial settlements that became Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. These people-often disrespectful, disorderly, presumptuous, insistent, and defiant-were drawn to the ideology of the Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s that stressed equality, independence, and property rights. The backcountry settlers pushed the emerging nation's political culture in a more radical direction than many of their leaders or the Founding Fathers preferred and helped put a democratic imprint on the new nation. This accessibly written book will resonate with all those interested in the social and political relationships of early America.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 324 pages, b&w illustrations. Published for the Williamsburg, VA Institute of Early American History & Culture. Instead of recounting, in detail, the public events of John Adams's extraordinary career, Peter Shaw views as a whole Adams's character, thought, and acts, personalizing for the reader the most remote of our Founding Fathers. This compact but comprehensive biography brilliantly portrays the poignant revelations of John Adams's inner life implicit in the recently released Adams family manuscripts. The formal side of Adams is reconciled with his remarkably colorful private life by the author's penetrating grasp of the whole man. Adams's behavior appears less eccentric when viewed in the context of its origin in the village life of eighteenth~century Massachusetts; and his politics and ideas appear less abstractly motivated when viewed in the light of the evolution of his character. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. McGill-Queen's University Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 913 pages, b&w illustrations, maps. Trigger's work integrates insights from archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, and geography. This wide knowledge allows him to show that, far from being a static prehistoric society quickly torn apart by European contact and the fur trade, almost every facet of Iroquoian culture had undergone significant change in the centuries preceding European contact. He argues convincingly that the European impact upon native cultures cannot be correctly assessed unless the nature and extent of precontact change is understood. His study not only stands Euro-American stereotypes and fictions on their heads, but forcefully and consistently interprets European and Indian actions, thoughts, and motives from the perspective of the Huron culture. The Children of Aataentsic revises widely accepted interpretations of Indian behaviour and challenges cherished myths about the actions of some celebrated Europeans during the "heroic age" of Canadian history. In a new preface, Trigger describes and evaluates contemporary controversies over the ethnohistory of eastern Canada.

Hardcover. Prion, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages. In terms of both words and images the world had never seen the like of the American comic book. They were bizarre, morbid, lurid, risque and bursting with subconscious desires of burgeoning youth culture. By the time 1954 arrived their were 500 different comics being published by 35 different companies, selling over 60 million copies a month between them. This is the history of the era and the art it produced. The book looks at the pioneers of the comic book and the comic's founding links with sleazy pulp magazines; the campaign for censorship; the fraught relationship between the comic book artists and their publishers; how what they did was rarely recognized as art at the time - and of course the comics themselves.

Softcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press , 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, dark gray covers with some fading. 639 pages. A detailed documentary on the American Colonial Society, discussing culture, politics, religion, and much more. David Potter and Gordon L. Thomas have selected representative and important speeches and exhortations delivered by famous Americans from the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The selections are arranged in five categories--those dealing with academic, legal, occasional, political, and religious matters. They are drawn from every stratum of colonial activity--from the classrooms, clerical studies, town meetings, provincial assemblies, and the bar. Great names abound in these pages, but, frequently, expounders of great ideas found here are unremembered figures whose works cannot be found easily elsewhere. The editors have carried out careful research on each speech to assure the authenticity of the text. They have added, for each selection, a note on the speaker and on the place where he delivered his address. Clean copy.

Softcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Large softcover, 263 pages, b&w photos ad illustrations. In-depth, career-spanning interviews with the cartoonists - Crumb, Shelton, and more - who forever altered the course of American comics with their anthology title, Zap Comix.The definitive Comics Journal interviews with the cartoonists behind Zap Comix, featuring: Supreme 1960s counterculture/underground artist Robert Crumb on how acid unleashed a flood of Zap characters from his unconscious; Marxist brawler Spain Rodriguez on how he made the transition from the Road Vultures biker gang to the exclusive Zap cartoonists' club; Yale alumnus Victor Moscoso and Christian surfer Rick Griffin on how their poster-art psychedelia formed the backdrop of the 1960s San Francisco music scene; Savage Id-choreographer S. Clay Wilson on how his dreams insist on being drawn; Painter and Juxtapoz-founder Robert Williams on how Zap #4 led to 150 news-dealer arrests; Fabulous, Furry, Freaky Gilbert Shelton on the importance of research; Church of the Subgenius founder Paul Mavrides on getting a contact high during the notorious Zap jam sessions; and much more. In these career-spanning interviews, the Zap contributors open up about how they came to create a seminal, living work of art. Partial color.

Softcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Large softcover, 263 pages, b&w photos ad illustrations. In-depth, career-spanning interviews with the cartoonists - Crumb, Shelton, and more - who forever altered the course of American comics with their anthology title, Zap Comix.The definitive Comics Journal interviews with the cartoonists behind Zap Comix, featuring: Supreme 1960s counterculture/underground artist Robert Crumb on how acid unleashed a flood of Zap characters from his unconscious; Marxist brawler Spain Rodriguez on how he made the transition from the Road Vultures biker gang to the exclusive Zap cartoonists' club; Yale alumnus Victor Moscoso and Christian surfer Rick Griffin on how their poster-art psychedelia formed the backdrop of the 1960s San Francisco music scene; Savage Id-choreographer S. Clay Wilson on how his dreams insist on being drawn; Painter and Juxtapoz-founder Robert Williams on how Zap #4 led to 150 news-dealer arrests; Fabulous, Furry, Freaky Gilbert Shelton on the importance of research; Church of the Subgenius founder Paul Mavrides on getting a contact high during the notorious Zap jam sessions; and much more. In these career-spanning interviews, the Zap contributors open up about how they came to create a seminal, living work of art. Partial color.