The city: American experience

Trachtenberg, Alan

Oxford University Press

Fourteen of Walker Evans's evocative photographs of Brooklyn Bridge, most of which have never been published, appear in this edition of Alan Trachenberg's Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. In the new afterword Trachenberg explores the history of Hart Crane's The Bridge, especially the poem's integral relationship with the powerful photography of Evans. "[Brooklyn Bridge] is familiar in so many movies, in so many stage sets and, as Mr. Trachtenberg shows in this brilliant . . . book, it is at least as much a symbol as a reality. . . . Mr. Trachtenberg is always exciting and illuminating."—Times Literary Supplement "The book is a skillful and insightful synthesis of materials about Brooklyn Bridge from such diverse fields as history, engineering, literature and art. Essentially it asks the question of why Brooklyn Bridge achieved such great impact on the nineteenth century American imagination and why it has continued to have a significant impact on twentieth century art and literature. In addition to its exploration of the bridge's symbolic significance, which includes perceptive analyses of such particular works as Hart Crane's great poem cycle and the paintings of artists like Joseph Stella, the book also includes a solidly researched account of the conception, planning and construction of the bridge. Trachtenberg's account of the intellectual and cultural sources of the bridge is particularly fascinating in its demonstration of the convergence of many different philosophical and ideological currents of the time around this great engineering enterprise, illustrating as effectively as any discussion I know the complex interplay of ideas and material culture."—John G. Cawelti, University of Chicago "Alan Trachtenberg's Brooklyn Bridge is a fascinating story, the philosophic genesis of the idea in Europe, John Roebling's heroic effort to translate it into masonry and steel, and the meanings that Americans attached to the physical object as an emblem of their aspirations."—Leo Marx, Amherst College, author of The Machine in the Garden

Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (Phoenix Book; P828)

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

University of Chicago Press

The Cold War, Sputnik, Joseph McCarthy, Fidel Castro, the Rosenbergs, Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Parks, "Father Knows Best," and "Rebel Without a Cause" are just a few of the events, people, and cultural phenomena that marked the decade of the 1950s. This book - a collection of two hundred large-scale duotone photographs of the 1950s culled from the New York Times photo archives - brings this watershed period to life and examines who and what was important and why.

The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives

Dreishpoon, Douglas

Trachtenberg, Prof. Alan

Yale University Press

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930

Winner of the 2005 Francis Parkman Prize A century ago, U.S. policy aimed to sever the tribal allegiances of Native Americans, limit their ancient liberties, and coercively prepare them for citizenship. At the same time millions of arriving immigrants sought their freedom by means of that same citizenship. In this subtle, eye-opening new work, Alan Trachtenberg argues that the two developments were, inevitably, juxtaposed: Indians and immigrants together preoccupied the public imagination, and together changed the idea of what it meant to be American. To begin with, programs of "Americanization" were organized for both groups, yet Indians were at the same time celebrated as noble "First Americans" and role models. Trachtenberg traces the peculiar effect of this implicit contradiction, with Indians themselves staging "The Song of Hiawatha" (which was also translated into Yiddish); Edward Curtis's poignant photographs memorializing vanishing heroism; and the Wanamaker department store making a fortune from commercialized versions of their once reviled cultures. By 1925 the national narrative had been rewritten, and citizenship was granted to Indians as a birthright, while the National Origins Act began to close the door on immigrants. In Shades of Hiawatha, Trachtenberg eloquently suggests that we must re-create America's tribal creation story in new ways if we are to reaffirm its beckoning promise of universal liberty.

History

Americas

Hill and Wang

Winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize
In this book, Alan Trachtenberg reinterprets some of America's most significant photographs, presenting them not as static images but rather as rich cultural texts suffused with meaning and historical content. Reading American Photographs is lavishly illustrated with the work of such luminaries as Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Walker Evans--pictures that document the American experience from 1839 to 1938. In an outstanding analysis, Trachtenberg eloquently articulates how the art of photography has both followed and shaped the course of American history, and how images captured decades ago provocatively illuminate the present.

Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

Democratic Vistas Volume Ameri

Braziller, George Inc

Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake. In America's westward expansion, labor unrest, newly powerful cities, and newly mechanized industries, the ideals and ideas by which Americans lived were reshaped, and American society became more structured, with an entrenched middle class and a powerful business elite. This is a brilliant, essential work on the origins of America's corporate culture and the formation of the American social fabric after the Civil War.

The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

"A book of elegance, depth, breadth, nuance and subtlety." --W. Richard West Jr. (Founding Director of the National Museum of the American Indian), The Washington Post
A century ago, U.S. policy aimed to sever the tribal allegiances of Native Americans, limit their ancient liberties, and coercively prepare them for citizenship. At the same time, millions of new immigrants sought their freedom by means of that same citizenship. Alan Trachtenberg argues that the two developments were, inevitably, juxtaposed: Indians and immigrants together preoccupied the public imagination, and together changed the idea of what it meant to be American. 
In Shades of Hiawatha, Trachtenberg eloquently suggests that we must re-create America's tribal creation story in new ways if we are to reaffirm its beckoning promise of universal liberty.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

A new assemblage of masterly essays from a foremost scholar of American history and culture Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones—like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural—are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating essays of Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas. With matchless authority, Trachtenberg moves from the daguerreotypes that entranced Americans from the start (and that Hawthorne made much of in The House of Seven Gables) to literary texts of which he is a peerless interpreter: Howell’s novels, Horatio Alger’s stories, Huckleberry Finn, the cityscapes of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane. In his exploration of the ways that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century writers tried to make sense of the modern American city he also addresses subjects as diverse as Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the early works of Lewis Mumford. The celebrated author of Reading American Photographs concludes his important new book with “readings” not only of the photographs of Walker Evans, Wright Morris, and Eugene Smith, but of the city images of film noir.

Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Traces the history of corporations in the United States and looks at how incorporation has affected business, politics, culture, education, and society itself

Incorporation of America: Culture and Society, 1865-1893 (American Century Series)

Foner, Eric

Hill & Wang Pub

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trachtenberg, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Trachtenberg, Alan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Trachtenberg, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The city: American experience

Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (Phoenix Book; P828)

The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930

Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

Democratic Vistas Volume Ameri

The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930

Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas

Incorporation of America: Culture and Society, 1865-1893 (American Century Series)