skopia
Avedon spent five years photographing drifters, miners, waitresses, and slaughterhouse workers against plain white paper. Printed larger than life, the faces leave nothing to hide behind and no cowboy myth standing.
Still the sharpest book written about rock and roll. Marcus treats Elvis, Robert Johnson, and Sly Stone as American artists on the scale of Melville, reading their records for what America is.
His marriage over and his job gone, Least Heat-Moon drove thirteen thousand miles of two-lane road in a van named Ghost Dancing and let Nameless, Tennessee and Dime Box, Texas do the talking.
Morse tapped the title into the first telegraph line in 1844. Howe's Pulitzer-winning account of antebellum America argues that communications, markets, and revival religion remade the country while Jacksonian politics took the credit.
Intelligence solves problems and Americans admire it. Intellect questions them, and Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning history tracks the resentment it draws through frontier revival preaching, business self-help, and a century of fights over the schools.
No American novel takes in more of the country. Dos Passos cuts fictional lives against newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and portraits of Henry Ford and Woodrow Wilson, covering the century's first three decades.
"I am an American, Chicago born," Augie announces, and the novel loosened its collar. He takes every job and every mentor the Depression offers him and refuses to be claimed by any.
Frank drove ten thousand miles across America in 1955 and 1956, then cut the trip to eighty-three photographs of jukeboxes, funerals, and flags. American photography has not left their shadow since.
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.