American Image captures the nation's experience through one hundred fifty years of photography by anonymous amateurs and celebrated masters.

What do Americans think about Mormons - and why do they think what they do? This is a story where the Osmonds, the Olympics, the Tabernacle Choir, Evangelical Christians, the Equal Rights Amendment, Sports Illustrated, and even Miss America all figure into the equation. The book is punctuated by the presidential campaigns of George and Mitt Romney, four decades apart. A survey of the past half-century reveals a growing tension inherent in the public's views of Mormons and the public's views of the religion that inspires that body.

A challenge to Hollywood's one-dimensional images of African Americans.

Most recognize the importance of public opinion in foreign policy decisions in democracies. However, despite its importance to American security, the question of how American foreign policy has affected the views of foreign publics about the United States is seldom asked. Throughout American Image in Turkey: U.S. Foreign Policy Dimensions, Giray Sadik explores the relationship between American foreign policy and Turkish public opinion about the United States since 9/11. In the post-9/11 era, Turkey was one of the earliest states to join the global coalition against terrorism, but American and Turkish cooperation in Afghanistan contrasts with their differences about Iraq, which destabilizes their strategic partnership. Sadik examines the effects of American military and economic aid, foreign direct investment (FDI), as well as bilateral trade between the United States and Turkey on Turkish public opinion about the United States, addressing how these tools can increase levels of favorable public opinion toward the United States. Sadik explains how different trends of U.S. military and economic policies toward Turkey translate into significantly different levels of influence on post-9/11 Turkish public opinion toward the United States. The implications of new geopolitical realities make explorations of the effects of foreign policy on public opinion all the more urgent.

In the 1930's and 1940's, the prevalent American view of China was that of a friendly, democratic, and increasingly Christian state, in many ways akin to the United States. This view was fostered by a wide range of literary, political, and business leaders, including Pearl S. Buck, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, Joseph Stillwell, Claire Chennault, and most notably, the powerful publisher of Life and Time, Henry R. Luce. This book shows how the notion of the Chinese as aspiring Americans helped shape American opinions and policies toward Asia for almost twenty years. This notion derived less from the reality of Chinese historical or cultural similarities than from a projection of American values and culture; in the American view, fueled by various political, economic, and religious interests, China was less a geographical entity than a symbol of American hopes and fears. One of the more important consequences was the idealization of China and the demonization of Japan.

Since its publication in 1960, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind has become a classic of historical scholarship. In it Merrill D. Peterson charts Thomas Jefferson's influence upon American thought and imagination since his death in 1826. Peterson shows how the public attitude toward Jefferson has always paralleled the political climate of the time; the complexities of the man, his thoughts, and his deeds being viewed only in fragments by later generations. He explains how the ideas of Jefferson have been distorted, defended, pilloried, or used by virtually every leading politician, historian, and intellectual. Through most of our history, political parties have engaged in an ideological tug-of-war to see who would wear "the mantle of Jefferson."

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.