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Summary
Summary
Never before has America's past been made so intriguingly accessible, both to the eyes and to the mind. Eyes of the Nation profits from seven chapters of lucid historical commentary by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, but at its core is a bountiful narrative-in-pictures drawn from the millions of maps, prints, photographs, posters, manuscripts, motion pictures, and other treasures in the Special Collections of the Library of Congress. In vivid and inclusive fashion, the book proceeds from the first encounters of Europeans and Indians, through colonial days and the founding of the nation, industrialization and the western expansion, and the catastrophes and transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right up to the present. Thanks to the brilliant art selection by Vincent Virga and the Library's Curators, every stage of the nation's development, every swerve in its fortunes, assumes arresting visual form.
Appearing alongside such pivotal artifacts as an Indian treaty from 1714, a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth, and a naval dispatch from 1941 ("AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS NOT A DRILL") are fascinating nuggets of popular culture and social history: an eighteen-pence note from 1776, the first telegraphic tape, a 1915 advertisement for the Pierce-Arrow automobile, a Pogo comic strip attacking Joseph McCarthy. Renowned American artists of every era--from John James Audubon and Matthew Brady to Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer, from Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Hopper, and Dorothea Lange to Robert Rauschenberg and Jennifer Bartlett--are exquisitely represented. Full, detailed captions accompany the images, and albumlike interludes explore four elemental themes of the American experience: the garden, the river, the city, and our people.
In this audacious and sophisticated approach to the show-and-telling of history--as visual as it is textual, as thorough as it is irresistibly anecdotal-- Eyes of the Nation is without peer.
Author Notes
Alan Brinkley was born in 1949. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and taught at MIT and Harvard as well as City University of New York and Princeton University before joining the Columbia faculty in 1991. He is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, where he was also Provost from 2003 - 2009. He is a historian of the New Deal. A prolific essayist, Brinkley writes regularly in magazines such as The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek and The New Republic and is an advocate for progressive issues. Brinkley has won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Book Award for History, and numerous other prizes and fellowships, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as a board member or trustee of several academic and policy research institutions and chairs the board of The Century Foundation.
His works include Liberalism and Its Discontents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As the subtitle suggests, the main point of this book is the 500 color and duotone illustrations. While Brinkley has provided a historical narrative, it is really a straightforward and sketchy scaffolding to support the illustrations and their lengthy accompanying captions. Virga and the curators of the Library of Congress have carefully selected a full range of works from the Library's Special Collections. Take maps, for example. First, there are not too many, and those that were chosen are illuminatingJoannes Jansson's 1653 map of America shows the process of discovery that had not gone west enough or north enough to reveal Baja California as a peninsulaor totemicGeneral John Cadwalader's hand-drawn map of Princeton sent to George Washington reveals little about strategy but is impressive all the same. Similar iconic items include a trial title page of Leaves of Grass with Whitman's annotations, Lincoln's early manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation, Irving Berlin's autographed lyrics for "God Bless America" or Robert Oppenheimer's handwritten equations on "Nuclear Reactions and Stability." What is most interesting is the ephemera, broadsides, caricatures, woodcuts, movie posters, photographs and other cheaply produced, broadly distributed items that let us see what the everyday people of America saw. Not everything is here: for example, given the initial impact of the Donner Party tragedy on Western immigration and the abiding, sensationalistic interest, it's hard to believe there wasn't a mention or an image. Still, likely to be a popular holiday book. 75,000 first printing; BOMC and History Book Club selections. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Five hundred color and black-and-white illustrations serve as signposts through the course of American history in this coffee-table book that is not simply for decoration but also for learning. Political, cultural, and social history are brought into the arena as artifacts from the special collections of the Library of Congress are arrayed across striking pages to effect a you-are-there kind of approach to the American pageant. Arrangement is by chapter, from the European encounter with the New World to the post^-World War II era; chapter introductions set the stage well, then rich and full captions to the illustrations carry the story into more specific detail. The illustrations range from old maps to engravings of wildlife, from lithograph portraits to contemporary photos of news events. American history is a vibrant quilt of ideas, energies, and personalities, and the sweep of it is caught in all its vibrancy in this luscious book that will prove to be a popular item in the history collection. Large print run and heavy promotion will undoubtedly create interest. --Brad Hooper
