Drawing from the vast photography collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States From the earliest photographic records of human habitation to the latest aerial and digital pictures, from almost uninhabited desert and isolated mountainous territories to suburban sprawl and densely populated cities, this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape. Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West. American Geography also looks at the evidence of older habitation from the adobe dwellings and ancient cultures of the Southwest to the Midwestern mounds, many of them prehistoric. SFMOMA's last photography exhibition to consider land use, Crossing the Frontier (1996), examined only the American West. At the time, this focus offered a different way to think about landscape, and a useful way to reconsider pictures of the region. American Geography expands upon the groundwork laid by Crossing the Frontier, providing a complex, thought-provoking survey. Photographers include: Carleton E. Watkins, Barbara Bosworth, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Mitch Epstein, An-My Lê, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Mishka Henner, Trevor Paglen, Victoria Sambunaris, Emmet Gowin, Robert Adams, Terry Evans, Dorothea Lange and Mark Ruwedel, among others.

A collection of seventeen essays examining the field of American cultural landscapes past and present. The role of J. B. Jackson and his influence on the field is a explored in many of them.

For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface

Tracing the impacts of militarism on the American landscape, through the lens of art, environmental studies, and politics Devour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military's impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics. Alongside interviews with prominent contemporary artists working in the landscape photography tradition, the images speak to photographers' varied motivations, personal experiences, and artistic approaches. The result is a surprising picture of the ways violence and warfare surround us. Although most modern combat has taken place abroad, the US domestic landscape bears the footprint of armed conflict--much of the environmental damage we live with today was caused by our own military and the expansive network of industries supporting its work. Designed to evoke a field book and to nod toward ephemera produced by earlier artists and activists, the catalogue features works by dozens of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb, Terry Evans, and many more.

Throughout the history of the United States, the concepts of “land” and “the West” have fired the American imagination and fueled controversy. The essays in Land in the American West deal with complex, troublesome, and interrelated questions regarding land: Who owns it? Who has access to it? What happens when private rights infringe upon the public good, or when one ethnic group is pitted against another, or when there is a conflict between economic and environmental values? Many of these questions have deep historical roots. They all have special significance in the modern American West, where natural resources are still abundant and large areas of land are federally owned.

Examines the lives and experiences of Show Indians from their own point of view.

One reason that the South attracts so much interest is that its history inevitably involves big questions—continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of “race,” the formation of national identity, the struggle between local and centralized authority. Because these issues are central to human experience, southern history properly conceived is of more than regional interest. In A Sphinx on the American Land, Peter Kolchin explores three comparative frameworks for the study of the nineteenth-century South in an effort to nudge the subject away from provincialism and toward the kind of global concerns that are already transforming it into one of the most innovative fields of historical research. The volume opens with a comparison between the South and the North, or what Kolchin terms the “un-South.” This basic context, he explains, provides an essential backdrop for understanding the South; how one conceptualizes “southernness” has meaning only in terms of what it is not. Turning to the cohesion and variations among what he calls the “many Souths,” Kolchin reminds us that there has never been one South or archetypal southerner. Internal distinctions—whether geographic, class, religious, or racial—ultimately raise the question of whether one can properly speak of “the” South at all. Finally, Kolchin explores parallels between the South and regions outside the United States—or “other Souths.” He considers a number of ways in which the South can be studied in a broad international setting, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the emancipation of southern slaves and Russian serfs. In an eloquent afterword, he ponders the nature and importance of comparative history. Kolchin examines how scholars have approached each of his comparative frameworks and how they might do so in the future, making A Sphinx on the American Land at once a work of history and of historiography. Illustrating the ways in which southern history is also American history and world history, this elegant, profound volume proves Kolchin to be one of the stellar southern historians of his generation.

Thomas K. Murphy explores the shifting history of European attitudes toward America, utilizing British and French writing from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Murphy studies a rich collage of literary, philosophical, and political writing by Europeans during this era. The book covers four stages in the development of European attitudes: traditional theories and their modification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of early American diplomacy on European attitudes, the cultural iconography of the French Revolution and of England during this same period, and the genre of the travel journal. Murphy has created an interesting historiography that augments our understanding of American history, but also illuminates the role that these imaginative texts about the New World played in the formation of significant social and political developments in modern European history.