In advance of celebrating its twentieth anniversary, the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art presents this beautiful catalog of highlights of American art drawn from its permanent collection. Each work is represented by a full-page photograph and an accompanying description that places the piece and its creator in artistic and historical context. American Selections features eighty-eight works selected from the 2,490 American works in the museum's modern, contemporary, photography, and works on paper collections. The artists represented include Diane Arbus, Georgia O'Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Andy Warhol (the only artist included in the book twice), and many others, both well known and emerging. American painting of the first half of the twentieth century was one of the core collections when the Harn Museum opened its doors in 1990. In the two decades since, the American holdings have been greatly expanded, particularly with paintings, drawings, installations, and photographs from the second half of the century, thanks to the generosity of many donors.

Highlights 40 masterworks of illustrated scientific art from the Rare Book Collection of the American Museum of Natural History.

Collects the poetry from the last decade of American Book Awards that best reflects the multicultural interests and accomplishments in American literature

Like the collection itself, the artists presented here are richly varied, from early- and mid-twentieth-century masters such as Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe to postwar icons such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol to contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, and Cindy Sherman."--BOOK JACKET.

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding. English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimke as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race. English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

No one has ever told America's story with more grace, clarity, and emotional power than Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton. In his books, ranging from the celebrated Civil War trilogies to the account of his boyhood in back-country Michigan, Catton brought the people of the past to such vivid life that he became the nation's best-loved and most widely read historian. Bruce Catton's friend and associate for many years, Oliver Jensen, has assembled this volume of selections of Catton's works - as a memorial to the man and a tribute to the historian. The excerpts chosen for Bruce Catton's America include portions of A Stillness at Appomattox, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; The American Heritage History of the Civil War, awarded a special Pulitzer Prize Citation; and representative selections from many other books and articles. The book also includes several previously unpublished pieces. Bruce Catton helped to create American Heritage magazine in 1954 and continued to influence it for the next twenty-four years - first as editor, then as senior editor and a frequent contributor. He spent much of his adult life as a newspaperman in the Midwest and Washington, D.C., and became a historian "by logical extension." Although best known as the greatest writer on the Civil War, he had wide-ranging interests. To those who are familiar with Bruce Catton's work, these selections will appear as old friends whose company never fails to provide enjoyment, stimulation, and a deep sense of worth. For those who have not yet read him, Bruce Catton's America will be an introduction to historical writing at its best.