Presents a photographic chronicle of the peoples, places, and events that form the modern United States, focusing on America's shared heritage and hopes for the future despite the many nationalities of the country's citizens.

Robert Hughes begins where American art itself began, with the Native Americans and the first Spanish invaders in the Southwest; he ends with the art of today. In between, in a scholarly text that crackles with wit, intelligence and insight, he tells the story of how American art developed. Hughes investigates the changing tastes of the American public; he explores the effects on art of America's landscape of unparalleled variety and richness; he examines the impact of the melting-pot of cultures that America has always been. Most of all he concentrates on the paintings and art objects themselves and on the men and women - from Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins to Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe, from Arthur Dove and George Bellows to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko -awho created them. This is an uncompromising and refreshingly opinionated exploration of America, told through the lens of its art.

This text provides a considered proposal to restructure the land-use pattern that prevails in most American metropolitan areas. It is intended for students studying urban issues.

How did the consumer system develop to pervade the whole of American culture? The rise of American mass culture helped to spread consumerism, turning the country into a nation of consumers.

The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes-deemed mere documents-regardless of the critic's expertise in the appropriate languages and cultures. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading by Daniel T. O'Hara traces the origin of this global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another, tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan's insights into the Real, and on Badiou's original theory of truth, O'Hara points to how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical reading. In Emerson's classic essay "Experience" (1844), America appears in and as a symptom of the critic's self-making that sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project-a literary version of the American self-made man. O'Hara rescues critical reading using James's late work, especially The Golden Bowl (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.

Looks at the history of the struggle for basic rights in America, focusing on the freedom of conscience and of expression, fundamental fairness, and equality