Eyes of the Nation - A Visual History of the United States by Vincent Virga
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.