Picturing A Nation

Art historian David Lubin examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings both embraced and resisted dominant social values. Lubin argues that artists such as George Bingham and Lily Martin Spencer were aware of the underlying social conflicts of their time and that their work reflected the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child rearing, its racial disharmony, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America.--From publisher description.

A National Book Award winner mines photographic gold to show—and tell—the story of the Great Depression. In an exquisitely curated volume of 140 full-color and black-and-white photographs, Martin W. Sandler unpacks the United States Farm Security Administration’s sweeping visual record of the Great Depression. In 1935, with the nation bent under unprecedented unemployment and economic hardship, the FSA sent ten photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, on the road trip of a lifetime. The images they logged revealed the daily lives of Southern sharecroppers, Dust Bowl farmers in the Midwest, Western migrant workers, and families scraping by in Northeast cities. Using their cameras as weapons against poverty and racism—and in service of hope, courage, and human dignity—these talented photographers created not only a collective work of art, but a national treasure. Grouped into four geographical regions and locked in focus by rich historical commentary, these images—many now iconic—are history at its most powerful and immediate. Extensive back matter includes photographer profiles and a bibliography.

Based on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world, Picturing the Page offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin – a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. By analysing the illustrations in fairy tales, classic "adult" literature reformatted for children, and war-time picture books, Megan Swift elucidates the vital and multifaceted function of illustrated children’s literature in repurposing the past. Picturing the Page demonstrates that while the texts of the past remained fixed, illustrations could slip between the pages to mediate and annotate that past, as well as connect with anti-religious, patriotic, and other campaigns that were central to Soviet children’s culture after the 1917 Revolution.

Picturing the Nation presents a visual history of modern India and explores visual representations of India from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The essays in this volume have illustrations, which have all been reproduced in full colour on art paper. The illustrated pages have also been placed within the chapters that refer to them. The images include chromolithographs, posters, cards and photographs of architecture and cultural displays. The book has a comprehensive introduction by Richard Davis and it attempts to answer the question how is it that so many persons have been persuaded to die willingly for something as recently imagined as the nation? Market: University and college departments of history, sociology, social anthropology, the visual arts, art history. The book is also accessible to a wider audience interested in the visual media and in the history of modern India. This is the second book out in the Indian market in this area and the earlier one is Beyond Appearances? edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy (Sage 2003), which is a single colour book.

Henri Peyre (1901-1988), a giant figure in French studies, did more to introduce Americans to the modern literature and culture of French than any other person. Sterling Professor and chair of the French Department of Yale University for more than four decades, Peyre was also the author of forty-four books, a brilliant speaker, and a mentor to two generations of students. He left enormous legacies as both teacher and scholar. Peyre also left a large and fascinating body of correspondence. This collection of his letters documents the era in which he lived. His lively letters also bear witness to the vast network of his friends and colleagues, including such major post-war literary figures as Robert Penn Warren, Andre Gide, and Andre Malraux.

The untold story of a major Australian artist. Regarded in his day as an important Australian impressionist painter, A.H. Fullwood (1863-1930) was also the most widely viewed British-Australian artist of the Heidelberg era. Fullwood's illustrations for the popular Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and the Bulletin, as well as leading Australian and English newspapers, helped shape how settler-colonial Australia was seen both here and around the world. Meanwhile his paintings were as celebrated as those of his good friends Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. So why is Fullwood so little known today? In this pioneering, richly illustrated biography, Gary Werskey brings Fullwood and his extraordinary career as an illustrator, painter, and war artist back to life, while casting a new light on the most fabled era in the history of Australian art. 'Gary Werskey's compelling and vivid biography of A.H. Fullwood -- a decade-long labour of love, written with a sharp, empathetic eye - rescues one of Australia's most accomplished artists from oblivion. It also stands as a highly original and deeply researched history of Australian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' -- Mark McKenna 'Through extensive, patient research, a discerning eye and lyrical prose, Gary Werskey recovers the life of brilliant artist A.H. Fullwood and guides us on a fresh journey into the fabled world of Australian art and artists in the crucible decades of the 1880s and 1890s. Here is a fascinating creation story about the visual language of a nation enchanted by its own dreams.' -- Grace Karskens 'Gary Werskey's essential and rousing portrait lifts Fullwood to his rightful place in the pantheon of Australian art, and reminds us how much the nation owes a generation of inspired bohemians for uncovering and defining its character and identity. It's a great read, and looks beautiful.' -- Don Watson 'Werskey has used the engaging life and work of A.H. Fullwood to re-cast the history of Australia's settler-colonial art. Set against the era's revolution in how art was produced and reproduced, Fullwood's pictures reveal him to be a master of half-toned illustrations, underpinned by the high-keyed palette of his creativity. A double vision splendid!' -- Humphrey McQueen 'An outstanding account of one of Australia's most fascinating Bohemian artists. Werskey not only reveals the very heart of Fullwood's art, but uncovers an Australian Georgic in which a prosperous agriculture emerges on small farms, and the life of the pub and the office and the quiet corners of the everyday in settler Australia are brilliantly evoked.' -- Jeanette Hoorn

A colorful look at the relationship between ethnic nationalism and gaudy dress in the early 19th-century United States

The remarkable story of how a First Nations chief, an artist and a mountaineer evolved a new form of environmental and cultural activism, and saved 50,000 hectares of forest in the processThe history of British Columbia is rife with stories of conflict between loggers and environmentalists, First Nations and government-backed corporations. Many of them have ended in violence, arrests and clear-cutting. Between 1997 and 2007 Farm License 38 , encompassing Sims Creek in the upper Elaho Valley became the site of a wholly different kind of protest. Because of the actions of ten thousand people brought together by Squamish Nation Hereditary Chief Bill Williams, artist Nancy Bleck and the late mountaineer John Clarke, this land - a 50,000-hectare section of the Squamish First Nation now known as Wild Spirit Places--was saved. It was a stunning example of how welcoming people to the land, showing them its physical and spiritual wealth and allowing them to experience it themselves transformed the way they saw it. And by quietly, cumulatively building a critical mass of people who had seen--witnessed--this land firsthand and come to view it as important; the Uts'am/WitnessProject provided a new way for peacefully mobilizing people and preserving land from logging. Picturing Transformation is the story of Uts'am/Witness, a series of camping weekends held at Sims Creek that brought together First Nations and non-First Nations people to walk, sleep, eat, make art, have conversations and participate in ceremonies on this disputed land. Through the words and photos of those who attended, this beautiful book pays homage to the power that people with strong vision and a common purpose can play in honouring tradition, safeguarding land and changing policy. It is a lesson in the possibilities for resolving conflict peacefully, now and in the future.homage to the power that people with strong vision and a common purpose can play in honouring tradition, safeguarding land and changing policy. It is a lesson in the possibilities for resolving conflict peacefully, now and in the future.