 | A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (Perennial Classics) by Howard Zinn
Buy used from: $11.91 The best! This book started me thinking about who writes history and how history influences group identity.
|
 | Greta Pratt: Using History by Greta Pratt
Buy new: $32.96 / Used from: $12.00 These photographs are amazing, funny, and inciteful! An extremely revealing look at Americans interpreting history.
|
 | America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904-1940 (Aperture Monograph)
Buy used from: $11.80 Poignant and stirring, Hine's photographs where the catalyst for ennacting American child labor laws.
|
 | Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America by Richard Slotkin
Buy new: $31.45 / Used from: $16.99 A classic! Slotkin looks at how western imagery has influenced American policy.
|
 | Leisure by Bill Owens
Buy new: $21.86 / Used from: $15.98 Love it! You will laugh your head off at this hysterical look at Americans.
|
 | Acts of Charity by Mark Peterson
Buy new: $2.23 / Used from: $0.29 Peterson spent years documenting how super rich Americans spend their money in the name of the poor. Incredible photographs of parties most of us never get invited to.
|
 | Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South by Walker Evans
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $3.52 Documentary at it's finest.
|
 | Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt
Buy new: $29.70 / Used from: $16.86 Levitt's work is lyrical and unpretentious.
|
 | Playing Indian (Yale Historical Publications Series) by Professor Philip J. Deloria
Buy new: $13.88 / Used from: $5.74 Deloria examines how the image of the American Indian tells us more about other Americans than about Natives.
|
 | William Eggleston's Guide by John Szarkowski
Buy new: $26.37 / Used from: $24.00 There is nothing like it! His way of seeing the American south is all his own, simple, pure, wonderful.
|
 | Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans by Alan Trachtenberg
Buy new: $16.20 / Used from: $6.05 Professor Emeritus at Yale, Trachtenberg is truly phenomenal.
|
 | Alec Soth: Niagara by Alec Soth
Buy new: $43.23 / Used from: $55.64 I saw him lecture and this book promises to be great!
|
 | Mitch Epstein: Family Business
Buy used from: $59.50 Epstein document of the demise of a family business along with a small american town is visionary.
|
 | George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 by Karal Ann Marling
Buy used from: $4.30 Marling examines the image of George Washington throughout the decades. This book is insightful and very funny.
|
 | Friedlander by Peter Galassi
Buy used from: $99.83 A true visionary. Poetic as only he can be.
|
 | Chris Verene by Chris Verene
Buy new: $52.10 / Used from: $33.63 Verene documents the town and people of his upbringing in way that lets the viewer understand what these people mean to him.
|
 | Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
Buy new: $26.37 / Used from: $22.00 It doesn't get any better than this.
|
 | Robert Frank: The Americans by Robert Frank
Buy used from: $144.98 A classic! This list would not be complete without this.
|
 | In The American West by Laura Wilson
Buy used from: $199.79 This book is an incredible testament to how a New Yorker views the American west.
|
Listmania!
