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Tracy Campbell

This “fascinating, engaging” history of St. Louis’s monument to American expansion reveals a story of greed, discrimination, and community displacement (NextSTL.com). 
 
 Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch is one of the world’s most widely recognized structures and attracts millions of tourists to St. Louis every year. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, its story is one of innovation and greed; civic pride and backroom deals. Weaving together social, political, and cultural perspectives, historian Tracy Campbell uncovers the complicated and troubling history of this iconic symbol.
 
 In this revealing account, Campbell shows that the so-called Gateway to the West was the scheme of shrewd city leaders who were willing to steal an election, destroy historic buildings, and drive out communities in order to make downtown St. Louis more profitable. Campbell also tells the human story of the architect Eero Saarinen, whose prize-winning design brought him acclaim but also charges of plagiarism, and who didn’t live to see the completion of his vision.

Yale University Press

Icons of America

The Gateway Arch

Leo Braudy

The story behind the massive white block letters set into a steep Los Angeles hillside—and the city and culture they represent: “Terrific.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
 To so many who see its image, the Hollywood sign represents the earthly home of that otherwise ethereal world of fame, stardom, celebrity—the American and worldwide aspiration to be in the limelight, to be, like the Hollywood sign itself, instantly recognizable.

 How an advertisement erected in 1923, touting the real estate development Hollywoodland, took on a life of its own is a story worthy of a movie itself. Leo Braudy traces the remarkable life of this distinctly American landmark, which has been saved over the years by a various fans and supporters, among them Alice Cooper and Hugh Hefner, who spearheaded its reconstruction in the 1970s. He also uses the sign’s history to offer an intriguing look at the rise of the film business from its earliest, silent days through the development of the studio system that helped define modern Hollywood. Mixing social history, urban studies, literature, and film, along with forays into such topics as the lure of Hollywood for utopian communities and the development of domestic architecture in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Sign is a fascinating account of how a temporary structure has become a permanent icon of American culture.
 
 “An entertaining tale.”—The Washington Post

The Hollywood Sign

Arthur C. Danto

“Astutely traces the ripple effects of Warhol’s blurring of the lines between commercial and fine art, and art and real life…masterful.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
 Art critic, philosopher, and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award Arthur Danto delivers a compact, masterful tour of Andy Warhol’s personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. Danto traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. He offers close readings of individual Warhol works, including their social context and philosophical dimensions, key differences with predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, and parallels with successors like Jeff Koons.
 
 By drawing on subject matter understandable to the ordinary American, Warhol revolutionized the way we look at art. In this book, Danto brings to bear encyclopedic knowledge of Warhol’s time and shows us Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figure—artist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopher—who retains permanent residence in our national imagination.

Andy Warhol

Eric J. Sundquist

“Sundquist’s careful, thoughtful study unearths new and fascinating evidence of the rhetorical traditions in King’s speech. ”—Drew D. Hansen, author of The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. , and the Speech That Inspired a Nation

“I have a dream”—no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr. , in 1963. King’s speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice—debates as old as the nation itself—and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom.

This book is the first to set King’s speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings. At a time when the meaning of the speech has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause, Sundquist clarifies the transformative power of King’s “Second Emancipation Proclamation” and its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality.

“The [‘I Have a Dream’] speech and all that surrounds it—background and consequences—are brought magnificently to life … In this book he gives us drama and emotion, a powerful sense of history combined with illuminating scholarship. ”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

King's Dream

Gore Vidal

This New York Times bestseller offers “an unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all” (New York Review of Books).

In Inventing a Nation, National Book Award winner Gore Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls, and the salons of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. We come to know these men, through Vidal’s splendid prose, in ways we have not up to now—their opinions of each other, their worries about money, their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings them to life at the key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation. He also illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they delivered, and the institutions of government by which we still live. More than two centuries later, America is still largely governed by the ideas championed by this triumvirate.

The author of Burr and Lincoln, one of the master stylists of American literature and most acute observers of American life, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of these formidable men

Icons of America - סדרת הספרים

Icons of America - סדרת הספרים

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