american culture

Hardcover. Newtown CT, The Taunton Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 266 pages. The past has left behind only scattered clues that, on their own, provide little insight into how the people of early America lived and the details of their daily lives. The photographs in this book, the deeply informed narrative that accompanies them, and the eyewitness accounts of daily life that the author weaves throughout, provide a fresh perspective on our early American ancestors and the places they called home. This book is about how their houses and their life in them, from the wealthy to the impoverished, from New York City to the small farms and plantations of the South, from coastal fishing towns to the Western frontier of Indiana and Kentucky. The stories focus on the remarkably vivid differences from one part of the country to the next, class and culture, and the realities of everyday life for American families. These stories twine around a wide selection of HABS photographs of early houses, covering the variety and evolutions of house styles -- not by labeling the style but by explaining the style in the context of everyday life. Richly illustrated with handsome black-and-white photography of old houses from the Library of Congress Historic American Building Survey (HABS) collection and supplemented with period woodcuts, engravings, drawings, paintings, artifacts, and maps, the book is printed on a 4-color press for a depth of tone. Sidebar excerpts from diaries, journals, and letters inject graphic eyewitness descriptions, adding an additional layer of insight. The book also includes sidebars called Still Standing that traces the history of specific houses, from their origins to the present and includes information on the original family, how the house has evolved over the centuries, and how it's used today.

Softcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, reprint, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 378 pages. Namias shows that visual, literary, and historical accounts of the capture of Euro-Americans by Indians are commentaries on the uncertain boundaries of gender, race, and culture during the colonial Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. She compares the experiences and representations of male and female captives over time and on successive frontiers and examines the narratives of captives Jane McCrea, Mary Jemison, and Sarah Wakefield. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Glitterati, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The book is the first to document the American punk scene to the public at large and now represents the epitome of the scene at the timeFeatures photographs of artistic and performance luminaries such as Man Ray, Tennessee Williams, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Zandra Rhodes, Divine, Lance Loud, and Marilyn Chambers, among others.

Hardcover. New York, Glitterati, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The book is the first to document the American punk scene to the public at large and now represents the epitome of the scene at the timeFeatures photographs of artistic and performance luminaries such as Man Ray, Tennessee Williams, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Zandra Rhodes, Divine, Lance Loud, and Marilyn Chambers, among others.

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press , 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1911, famed cartoonist Winsor McCay debuted one of the first animated cartoons, based on his sophisticated newspaper strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," itself inspired by Freud's recent research on dreams. McCay is largely forgotten today, but he unleashed an art form, and the creative energy of artists from Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer to Walt Disney and Warner Bros.' Chuck Jones. Their origin stories, rivalries, and sheer genius, as Reid Mitenbuler skillfully relates, were as colorful and subversive as their creations-from Felix the Cat to Bugs Bunny to feature films such as Fantasia-which became an integral part and reflection of American culture over the next five decades. Pre-television, animated cartoons were aimed squarely at adults; comic preludes to movies, they were often "little hand grenades of social and political satire." Early Betty Boop cartoons included nudity; Popeye stories contained sly references to the injustices of unchecked capitalism. "During its first half-century," Mitenbuler writes, "animation was an important part of the culture wars about free speech, censorship, the appropriate boundaries of humor, and the influence of art and media on society." During WWII it also played a significant role in propaganda. The Golden Age of animation ended with the advent of television, when cartoons were sanitized to appeal to children and help advertisers sell sugary breakfast cereals.

Softcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format. 158 pages. A book of quietly beautiful photographic portraits of Native-American women, accompanied by their own reflections on what it means to be a woman and an Indian in America. The result is a startlingly honest and often poetic work. The women within these pages defy stereotype: they are mothers, activists, artists, environmentalists, and community leaders. Whether living on reservations or in cities, they have struggled to preserve an ancient culture and a land under siege. 85 black-and-white photographs. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 494 pages. Women's Camera Work explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. In the process, Judith Fryer Davidov focuses on the lives and work of a particular network of artists linked by time, interaction, influence, and friendship--one that included Gertrude Kasebier, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and Laura Gilpin. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. The tintype, patented in 1856, was a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. For common laborers and their families, the opportunity to join the ranks of those who owned pictures of family and friends--the upper classes--was momentous. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype: occupational portraits, photographs of working people with the tools of their trade. Michael L. Carlebach examines the historical significance of these tintypes and finds that they reveal a great deal about late nineteenth-century values. The subjects of these images are plumbers proudly holding their wrenches and pipe cutters, carpenters with their saws and lathing hatchets, textile workers with their spindles and yarn, icemen with their tongs. These people lived and worked at a time when a depersonalized factory system run by production and efficiency experts was beginning to dominate American industry and culture. Many of the men and women in these tintypes were part of a disappearing class of self-employed artisans and journeymen; their portraits proudly stress their individuality and the essential nobility of their work.

Softcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 656 pages. In mythic sagas of the American West, the wide western range offered boundless opportunity to a limited cast of white men. Buffalo roamed, deer and antelope played, and women's voices were never heard. Writing the Range allows us to hear many long-silenced women: Spanish-Mexican settlers and American Indians on New Spain's northern frontiers; Chinese, Basque, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Slavic, and Irish immigrants; film stars Dolores del Rio and Lupe Velez; Navajos and African Americans who moved to western cities during World War II; and the activist Mothers of East Los Angeles, who organized to resist environmental dangers to their community. A valuable introduction to the rapidly changing field of western history, Writing the Range explains clearly how race, class, and culture are constructed and connected. The first section examines issues raised by more than a decade of multicultural western women's histories; following are six chronological sections spanning four centuries. Each section offers a short introduction connecting is essays and placing them in analytic and historical perspective. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, Center for American Places, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 108 pages. Full color photographs by Mike Smith. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Owings Mills MD, Stemmer House, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with mild fading to spine. INSCRIBED BY THE ILLUSTRATOR on the front fly leaf. A collection of fifteen Brer Rabbit trickster tales from the Afro-American culture of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Color illustrations by Clinton Arrowood. Clean copy.