WE AMERICANS: CELEBRATING A NATION, ITS PEOPLE, AND ITS PAST, National Geographic Books, $40.00.
THE events that have shaped America are well detailed in this visually outstanding book featuring more than 400 photographs and illustrations from the collections of the National Geographic Society and the National Archives. The 400-page volume’s 14 distinguished contributors explore the development of America from colonial times to the internet culture of today. Editors Thomas B. Allen and Charles O. Hyman provide a vivid tale of triumph and tragedy through striking photographs that highlight the essays, with topics that include a mountain of skulls in Michigan that typified the slaughter and near extinction of the buffalo–and the Indians that the animals sustained; nineteenth century cotton pickers; Klondike-bound-prospectors causing a bottleneck on the Yukon’s 3,500-foot high Chilkoot Pass; soldiers at a Union prison encased in “detention barrels”; suffragettes marching down New York City’s Fifth Avenue in 1912; a chain gang building a state road in Georgia; the body of President John F. Kennedy lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol; and the Apple I computer, designed in 1976.
