"Charles Bird King is one of the least known--yet one of the most important--artists of the precamera era in this country, rivaling George Catlin as a portrait painter who recorded the features and costumes of American Indians in the early days of the Republic. Between 1821 and 1842 King painted the portraits of more than one hundred prominent Indian leaders who were brought to Washington as guests of the government." "Commissioned by Thomas L. McKenney, founder of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the paintings became known as the War Department gallery of Indian portraits. They were placed in the Smithsonian Institution in 1858." "In addition to telling the story behind the King paintings, their conception and subsequent history, the author includes illuminating sidelights about United States-American Indian diplomatic history, as well as some fascinating human interest material about the Indian delegates who visited Washington in those early days." -- Book Jacket.

In an era before photography, three painters--Charles Bird King, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer--traveled far and wide to record the culture of Native Americans. For the first time in one volume, "Native Americans: A Portrait" presents a major selection of original paintings, drawings, and lithographs by these three artists. More than 1,000 full-color reproductions offer eyewitness accounts of battles, hunts, ceremonies, and daily life.

With cheaper publishing costs and the explosion of periodical publishing, the influence of New World travel narratives was greater during the nineteenth century than ever before, as they offered an understanding not only of America through British eyes, but also a lens though which nineteenth-century Britain could view itself. Despite the differences in purpose and method, the writers and artists discussed in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World-from Fanny Wright arriving in America in 1818 to the return of Henry James in 1904, and including Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others, as well as artists such as Eyre Crowe-all contributed to the continued building of America as a construct for audiences at home. These travelers' stories and images thus presented an idea of America over which Britons could crow about their own supposed sophistication, and a democratic model through which to posit their own future, all of which suggests the importance of transatlantic travel writing and the ’idea of America’ to nineteenth-century Britain.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.