An American Album

The purpose of this book is to revisit an utterly vanished earlier America by means of photographs running from 1839, where the first daguerreotypes were taken, until the eve of the First World War, which marks the end of an era, or what we may regard as the beginning of our own time.

An American Girl's Family Album helps you tell the story of the American girls in your family - your grandmother, your mother, and yourself. What is your favorite holiday? Who was your mother's best friend when she was nine? How much could a dollar buy when your grandmothers were girls?

As if recovering from a raucous dream of the 1960s, Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell, and Dan Peek arrived on 1970s American radio with a sound that echoed disenchanted hearts of young people everywhere. The three American boys had named their band after a country they’d watched and dreamt of from their London childhood Air Force base homes. What was this country? This new band? Classic and timeless, America embodied the dreams of a nation desperate to emerge from the desert and finally give their horse a name. Celebrating the band’s fiftieth anniversary, Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell share stories of growing up, growing together, and growing older. Journalist Jude Warne weaves original interviews with Beckley, Bunnell, and many others into a dynamic cultural history of America, the band, and America, the nation. Reliving hits like “Ventura Highway,” “Tin Man,” and of course, “A Horse with No Name” from their 19 studio albums and incomparable live recordings, this book offers readers a new appreciation of what makes some music unforgettable and timeless. As America’s music stays in rhythm with the heartbeats of its millions of fans, new fans feel the draw of a familiar emotion. They’ve felt it before in their hearts and thanks to America, they can now hear it, share it, and sing along.

A Siamese cat beneath a clotheslinethree women with linked arms standing on the front lawna man drying his hands on a dish towel in front of the kitchen stove. These scenes are part of Close to Home and the accompanying the Getty Museum exhibition held from October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005, which celebrate snapshots--"found" photographs by anonymous photographers--that capture everyday life in all of its joy, banality, and mystery. Taken between 1930 and the mid-1960s, these photographs, most of them in black-and-white, create an unpretentious portrait of suburban American life by untrained photographers whose images can be unexpectedly lyrical and moving. Complementing the photographs is an essay by noted Southern California writer D. J. Waldie. The snapshot, Waldie writes, "depending on who's doing the looking, is horrifying, hilarious, pointless, or suffused with yearning." Waldie speculates on the meanings and implications of the snapshots in this book and of snapshots generally, which he sees as expressions of "the hunger of memory."

Tableaus and portraits of many of the individuals who have influenced American history, culture, and character.

'Snapshot Chronicles' is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera.

Provides a look at the experiences of Mexican immigrants, relating stories of their arrival in the United States and their integration into a new society.

*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism* *A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012* The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Taking its title from Danger Mouse's pioneering mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album, Kevin Young's encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.