Explores the meaning of the subject matter and fame of the paintings of Grandma Moses, revealing an extensive longing for the memories and comforts of the American past portrayed in her work.

Product Description: The penny bank craze of the twentieth century began quietly enough. Here, a slotted pottery pig from Scotland. There, a grimacing human face made in Bennington, Vermont. In 1793, penny banks first appeared in America, along with the first large copper pennies...read more

Product Description: Minnesota’s Capitol is an educational and entertaining look at the house that Minnesota built. Replicated in butter sculpture and picture postcards by creative and enterprising citizens, the Capitol building in St. Paul was the pride of the state and the envy of the nation when it opened in 1905...read more

Looks at the works of the American painter, describing his depection of American society and how it was influenced by the events in his life.

Product Description: "Working in a number of genres across a career that spanned more than fifty years, Martha's Vineyard artist Stanley Murphy painted the Island with the exacting eye of a seasoned craftsman and the magical soul of a poet. ""Where Magic Wears a Red Hat: The Art of Stanley Murphy"" focuses on the artist's Island portraits, with thirty-six color plates of his paintings and drawings dating from the 1950s through the early years of the new century...read more

Provides a fascinating and entertaining look inside the world of the society debut, from the colonial era to the present day, documenting the colorful history and evolution of the tradition, and explains why this custom and its social rituals continue to persist. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in the winter of 1776, received an urgent message. Please fix upon some particular color for a flag. It was from an understandably exasperated George Washington. The Continental Armies had taken the field under a babble of emblems and devices...read more

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Product Description: It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) is, without question, the best-loved of American artists. And although his work appears in countless books, this is the first to seriously access his achievement. Not a biography, this is a cultural history of Rockwell, setting his work in the context of American life. 100 illustrations, 50 in full color.

Product Description: He didn't write music or lyrics and wasn't too articulate on the subject of himself, but when he created his dream house Elvis Presley spoke volumes about who he was. From the musical notes that dance across the gates to the soaring columns of the neo-Southern manse, from the glittering stairwells to the jungle rec room to the plush-lined bathroom suite where he died, the colors and textures and shapes of Graceland speak eloquently for the boy from Tupelo who became the King of Rock 'n' Roll...read more

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Product Description: A cornerstone of the Harcourt's publishing program for 25 years, Macroeconomics: Private and Public Choice has been one of the company's most solid and enduring texts ever. It is considered to be the best existing principles of economics textbook emphasizing free markets...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Greta Pratt returns to the county fairs of her childhood to present a vision of Midwest communities largely unfamiliar to millions of American urban dwellers. For three summers she traveled the Midwest chronicling the life of the region—parades of civic pride, displays of exemplary harvests, and prizewinning heifers, beauty pageants, old-timer reunions, and annual storefront festivals...read more

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Three noted academics describe a new exhibit for the National Museum of American Art that uses the landscape photography of the eighties to show how visual artists have attempted to grapple with environmental issues.

Briefly describes Hopper's life and career, shows fourteen of his major paintings, and includes comments on their composition

Product Description: From stunning panoramas and majestic bridges to nuclear waste dumpsites, Between Home and Heaven captures the compelling complexity of contemporary landscape photography. Catalogue accompanying the exhibition in the National Museum of American Art.

The story behind an American icon--a group of Marines risking their lives for Old Glory at the battle of Iwo Jima--that has been reproduced in posters, stamps, movies, and sculpture

Product Description: More than 300 black-and-white illustrations vividly portray the fair and its many faces. Historic photographs show long-gone amusements-the wooden Cannon Ball roller coaster, an organ grinder and his monkey, reenactments of famous battles at the Grandstand-as well as early versions of fair scenes that know no era: crowds, traffic jams, trinket sellers, prize winners...read more