american culture

Hardcover. Baltimore MD, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 219 pages, endpapers map. Describes Jefferson's European journeys during his time as minister to the court of Louis XVI between 1784 and 1789, and explores the significance of his travels to American culture. Illustrated with some 60 b&w images from the period, and drawing on Jefferson's account books and correspondence, shows how his experiences shaped his intellectual and aesthetic development. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 284 pages, color and b&w illustrations.Often featuring lighthouses, bridges, or quaint country homes, Thomas Kinkade's soft-focus landscapes have permeated American visual culture during the past twenty years, appearing on everything from Bibles to bedsheets to credit cards. Kinkade sells his work through his shopping-mall galleries, QVC, the Internet, and Christian stores. He is quite possibly the most collected artist in the United States. While many art-world and academic critics have dismissed him as a passing fad or marketing phenomenon, the contributors to this collection do not. Instead, they explore his work and its impact on contemporary art as part of the broader history of American visual culture. They consider Kinkade's imagery and career in relation to nineteenth-century Currier and Ives prints and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the collectibles market and the fine-art market, the Thomas Kinkade Museum and Cultural Center, and "The Village at Hiddenbrooke," a California housing development inspired by Kinkade's paintings. The conceptual artist Jeffrey Vallance, the curator of the first major museum exhibition of Kinkade's art and collectibles, recounts his experiences organizing that show. All of the contributors draw on art history, visual culture, and cultural studies as they seek to understand Kinkade's significance for both art and audiences. Along the way, they delve into questions about beauty, class, kitsch, religion, and taste in contemporary art. Clean copy.

Softcover. Washington DC, Giles, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. Beautiful and poignant photographs by African American and other photographers (selected from the large and growing photography collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), accompanied by three short, insightful essays, reveal the rich and significant contributions African Americans have made to to our great American heritage.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 336 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century. Clean copy.

Softcover. self-published, 1st, 2017, Softcover, 238 pages, b&w illustrations. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on the title page. An historical and biographical study of the men from College Point, Queens, New York who rendered valuable service to their country in World War One. More than six hundred fifty served in the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Merchant Marine. Twenty-eight died. What gives the book its relatively unique character is that the hamlet was basically German in origin, primarily industrial, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a destination place for large numbers of entertainment-seeking New Yorkers. The book includes an overview of these elements, illustrating how each played its role before, during and, to a limited extent, after the war. These subjects are woven into a detailed analysis of how College Point, and its people weathered movements and events; labor strife, anti-German sentiment, espionage, the influenza epidemic, and a host of other forces that impacted American culture in general, and their lives in particular. Also told in chronological order, and brief vignettes are the stories of the twenty-eight men who went willingly to war, and died. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 273 pages, b&w illustrations. The first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture, resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls, to more than lack of "contact" with our "modern" world. The ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abbeville Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 222 pages in color and b&w. Tony Sarg (1880-1942), an American artist born in Guatemala to a diplomatic family, first achieved professional success as an illustrator in London and New York. But in the 1920s, he gained even greater renown for his touring puppet shows based on classic tales like Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe. Fusing the time-honored craft of traditional marionette shows with a playful modern sensibility, Sarg's productions were foundational to American puppetry: Jim Henson can be considered a direct artistic descendant. Yet this was only one facet of Sarg's varied accomplishments: he was also a pioneer in animated films and children's books, and, as a longtime designer for Macy's, he invented the gigantic balloons used in the firm's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (He also employed one of his parade balloons in the famous Nantucket Sea Serpent hoax of 1937.) This abundantly illustrated volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, is the first to survey Tony Sarg's protean career. It brings together imagery and artifacts from numerous public and private collections, and includes special sections on Sarg's long association with the island of Nantucket and his influence on American puppetry. Tony Sarg: Genius at Play will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of popular culture. Claen copy.

Hardcover. New York, PowerHouse, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Illustrated with full color photographs. Clean, bright copy. Rocking on tour with America"s heavy metal superstars--Kiss, Poison, Iron Maiden, Slaughter, Ted Nugent, Dokken, and Cinderella--photographer David Yellen tailgated among the headbangers, metalheads, burnouts, and self-styled fanatics waiting for the show or hanging around backstage hoping to meet their idols. The results are a captivating record of Yellen"s trip to metal"s Shangri-la.

Softcover. NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 244 pages. The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and Metis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters. Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era.

Hardcover. Edinburgh, Cadell and Co., Reprint, 1829, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 3 volume set. REBOUND. Each volume contains original pages, new covers. Age toning throughout with margins discolored to preliminary and end pages. Vol. 1 - 421 pages, fold out map tipped in to front with tape & small tears to edges; Vol. 2 - 432 pages; and Vol. 3 - 436 pages with fold out table tipped in to rear. Previous owner's book plate on front end paper on each volume.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Peabody Museum, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 527 pages, 10.25 x 7.75 inches. Scarce ethnological and archeological study of Liberia's culture and myths. Large fold-out colored map, measuring 20.25 x 43 inches, is slipped into the inner rear cover. Copious illustrations and diagrams throughout. Light chipping to paper covers but with a very good interior. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 225 pages, illustrated in b&w. In the first in-depth examination of music written for Hollywood animated cartoons of the 1930s through the 1950s, Daniel Goldmark provides a brilliant account of the enormous creative effort that went into setting cartoons to music and shows how this effort shaped the characters and stories that have become embedded in American culture. Focusing on classical music, opera, and jazz, Goldmark considers the genre and compositional style of cartoons produced by major Hollywood animation studios, including Warner Bros., MGM, Lantz, and the Fleischers. Tunes for 'Toons discusses several well-known cartoons in detail, including What's Opera, Doc?, the 1957 Warner Bros. parody of Wagner and opera that is one of the most popular cartoons ever created.

Softcover. Lincoln NE, Bison Books, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 368 pages. Documents the generations of Native peoples who for twelve millennia have moved through and eventually settled along the rocky coast, rivers, lakes, valleys, and mountains of a region now known as Maine. Arriving first to this area were Paleo-Indian peoples, followed by maritime hunters, more immigrants, then a revival of maritime cultures. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Native peoples in northern New England became tangled in the far-reaching affairs of European explorers and colonists. Twelve Thousand Years reveals how Penobscots, Abenakis, Passamaquoddies, Maliseets, Micmacs, and other Native communities both strategically accommodated and overtly resisted European and American encroachments. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 232 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Black & white and color photographs throughout. City scenes have been chronicled in photographs since the early 1800s, but street photography as traditionally defined has captured a relatively narrow field of these images. Revolutionizing the history of street photography, Unfamiliar Streets explores the work of Richard Avedon (1923-2004), Charles Moore (1931-2010), Martha Rosler (b. 1943), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), four American photographers whose careers in fashion, photojournalism, conceptual art, and contemporary art are not usually associated with the genre.Bussard's lively and engaging text, a timely response to a growing interest in urban photography, challenges the traditional understanding of street photography and makes original and important connections among urban culture, social history, and the visual arts, constructing a new historical model for understanding street photography. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, this book provides an interpretation of a compelling genre that is as fresh as its consideration of the city streets themselves, sites of commerce, dispossession, desire, demonstration, power, and spectacle.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd pr., 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 387 pages. Softcover. Black & white illustrations throughout. Faded spine. Light shelf wear to cover. Pen marks to three pages. Otherwise clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 536 pages. Illustrated in color and black-and-white. A landmark study of California's visual arts and poetry, 1925 to 1975, Utopia and Dissent demonstrates the profound influence this regional culture had on American art and thought. Bookselle's label on rear cover, wrinkle to page 513, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. University of South Carolina Press, Supreme Council, Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 269 pages. " ...a fascinating journey through the history of Scottish Rite in America. This comprehensive pictorial history provides valuable insights into the critical role masons have played throughout our nation's history." b/w, sepia, & color plates throughout. In Valley of the Craftsmen, the story of "higher degree" Freemasonry is depicted through portraits, official papers, material objects, photographs, buildings, and stagecraft. Featuring many previously unpublished images, Valley of the Craftsmen begins with rare illustrations of the English and French philosophical sources that were projected upon an American landscape vitalized and transformed by the concept of fraternity. The story is framed by American popular culture and the serious private effort of individual men in small towns and expansive cities who were intent on developing a moral life in service to their communities. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 275 pages, b&w photos. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Lawyer, educator, novelist, radio and television scriptwriter, film director and screenwriter, wartime intelligence operative, and full-time radical romantic, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to be an informer. This biography helps us understand the relationship between art and politics in American culture.

Hardcover. Center for American Places, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 184 pages. Professor and photographer John Willis is well aware of the exploitation that sometimes occurs when photographers enter impoverished communities for a project. So, in 1992, when he first traveled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota, he assured the elders of the Oglala Lakota Sioux that he would not be exhibiting any of the images he took while there. Over time, however, Willis earned the respect and trust of the community, and the elders--hoping that the photographs might bring aid to their community--urged him to show his work. The product of several visits to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Views from the Reservation is meant to open our eyes, minds, and hearts to the life, culture, and conditions of the Oglala Lakota people.

Hardcover. Chicago, IL, Center for American Places, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 184 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Includes CD. The product of several visits to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Views from the Reservation is meant to open our eyes, minds, and hearts to the life, culture, and conditions of the Oglala Lakota people. With his insightful and complex images Willis enlists several other voices to offer a more complete story: writer Kent Nerburn, who contributes an original essay; Lakota elders and Pine Ridge High School students, who offer poems; Emil Her Many Horses, the associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian, Kevin Gover, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, and Oglala Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox. Accompanying the book is Heartbeat of the Rez, a compact disc collecting traditional songs compiled by the author, the elders, and KILI, the radio station of the reservation.

Hardcover. NY, Prestel , 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 320 pages. Some of Walker Evans' most iconic images of 20th-century American culture are showcased in this book celebrating his 50-year career. Walker Evans was one of the most important American photographers of the 20th century. His focus on everyday life in America, in both urban and rural settings, makes him also one of the most relatable. This retrospective volume traces Evans' career through more than 300 images--from his first photographs of the late 1920s to his Polaroids of the 1970s. Organized thematically, the book examines topics such as Evans' relationship with the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, his work in postcards and magazines, and his lifelong exploration of the American vernacular. In addition, this volume features items from the photographer's own collection, including personal writings, signage, postcards, and other ephemera. Through these ancillary objects and a thorough overview of Evans' career, readers will come away with a better understanding of a photographer whose iconic photographs remain timeless.

Hardcover. Dresden, Verlag der Kunst, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 211 pages. Illustrated with 140 black & white photographs by Walter Rosenblum. Red remainder stamp on bottom edge. Text in English and German. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Seattle , Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. The Friedman brothers go after Tor Johnson, Leave It to Beaver, Bela Lugosi, Joey Heatherton, comic shop clerks, and ugly white guys. A thrilling, appalling trip through the backwaters of American culture.

Hardcover. Guilford CT, TwoDot, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 159 pages, b&w photos throughout. Classic Photographs from the Farm Security Administration 1936-1943. Featuring images by such renowned photographers as Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and several others, this book documents ranching culture in western states during the Great Depression and leading up to World War II. This was a period of great change in the ranching West that included the introduction of the automobile, electricity, radio, the telephone, and other technologies that drastically transformed the lives and work of ranching people, and some of the best documentation exists in the powerful documentary photographs by this remarkable group of photographers. Clean copy.