During the 1980s, the Reagan Administration financed and directed wars against popular movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua that left more than 300,000 dead and countless more wounded. Vowing to block “Soviet expansion,” the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency against leftist rebels in El Salvador while orchestrating an illegal and covert war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, mostly at the hands of U.

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is the first book to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape and frontier since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.The book features Ron Tarver’s beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy’s way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who grew up in a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an American.The Long Ride Home couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of films such as Lil Nas X’s hit time-travel western, Old Town Road (2019), and Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021), which was based on Greg Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy (2013), about Philadelphia’s contemporary African-American cowboy culture. Many of Tarver’s images were made in some of the same Philadelphia neighborhoods. Widespread interest in the Black experience in America will also make this book an especially important contribution to Black history.In addition to Tarver’s photographs, The Long Ride Home includes an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and celebration of the Black cowboy in America. It is certain to be an invaluable addition to American history for years to come.

Iceland is best known for its stunning scenery and majestic landscapes. When photographer Nancy Libson first visited Iceland for a hiking trip some twenty years ago, she immediately fell in love with the country and its dramatic landscape. She vowed to return again, camera in hand. Beginning in 2015, Libson did just that, revisiting Iceland for four additional summers to photograph the land and its people.When Libson began her project, she chose to get to know the Icelandic people in rural areas. As she continued to experience this remote and beautiful land, she developed an awareness of the unique qualities of childhood in Iceland, and so her emphasis shifted from people of all ages to children at home and at play. Libson noticed that Icelandic children were granted an unusual level of freedom while living securely in close-knit families and supportive communities. She was further inspired to capture Iceland’s remoteness and beauty and its impact on the children who live there.As portrayed in Children in Iceland, Libson’s photographs provide an intimate and evocative view of the lives of the children surrounded by Iceland’s natural landscape. By photographing Iceland’s children, Libson began to better understand not only the children, but through them the culture and spirit of growing up in this remarkable country. The book is further enhanced by an afterword by Kristín Helga Gunnarsdóttir, the well-known Icelandic children’s author, who shares her thoughts about the freedom that Icelandic children feel from living with and close to nature.

This book is a beautiful and engaging presentation of drawings and letters by John Douglas Woodward, (1846–1924), a prominent American artist/illustrator during the 1870s and 1880s. He was on assignment for New York publisher D. Appleton and Co. to make on-the-spot drawings for illustrations for Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt (1881–1883), which has been called the most important book of illustrations of the region of its time. Some 200 of his compositions appeared in the book as wood engravings, the least expensive mass media of the time, while he contributed the art for 13 steel engravings. Woodward traveled with the somewhat older and better-known artist, Harry Fenn, who was the lead artist for the very successful Picturesque America, published by D. Appleton in parts from 1872–1874. Woodward was the second most prolific contributor to Picturesque America and, like Fenn, also travelled and drew for Picturesque Europe (1878–1879).Woodward’s travels for Picturesque Palestine yielded a treasure trove of unique historical art and correspondence. Most drawings for book and magazine illustrations during this period were discarded by the artist after the printing plates were made. But Woodward saved his, providing a visual record, often in full color, of the region, in addition to the black-and-white illustrations in the book. In presenting them alongside his lively, engaging letters, this book will appeal to those interested in the history and art of the Middle East as well as in the appearance of places of importance mentioned in the Holy Bible and the specifics of travel to the region during the 1870s, when there was almost no tourist infrastructure and limited knowledge of other cultures.Although Picturesque Palestine is well-known to scholars and connoisseurs and available in some libraries and on-line, Woodward’s drawings and letters recording his trip to Palestine are not. The exquisite drawings, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and gouache, belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and have been stored since 1941 at Shrine Mont, a conference center in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (founded by the artist’s nephew). The letters to his wife and mother are in the collection of the Valentine History Museum in Richmond.

In his award-winning book, American/True Colors, Stephen Marc presents one of the most comprehensive photographic surveys ever conducted about America and Americans. For his efforts–the survey includes both the Obama and Trump presidencies–or his artistry, and for his unique African-American perspective, the Independent Publishers Book Awards gave American/True Colors its 2021 Gold Medal for the Best Book of the Year in Photography.But Stephen Marc was not finished with telling the American story. In Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times, the artist takes us on another sweeping journey, coast to coast, this time straddling before and during the COVID years when America and Americans were confronted by a multitude of unprecedented challenges that affected citizens in every aspect of life no matter where they might live.Introduced by Dr. Carla D. Hayden, 14th Librarian of Congress and the first woman and first African American to hold that distinguished post since its founding in 1802, and featuring 210 new photographs by Stephen Marc, including 85 captivating digital montages, Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times offers a creative and highly insightful look at how Americans have been living their life on the streets during this time of COVID and controversial Supreme Court rulings and the severe impacts of climate change, social injustice, mass shootings and gun violence, inflation, intense political division, the Big Lie, the January 6 insurrection, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and so much more.As was the case with American/True Colors, in Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times we see how the American journey continues. How in our ongoing search for a more perfect Union we need to recognize and respect more fully the personal histories that brought us here and the truths we need to face. How in the process of moving forward toward an uncertain future we embrace the joy of living and learn to grow and heal as families, communities, and a nation.

Janet Pritchard’s romance with the American West began with horseback riding, watching movies, and hearing her dad’s dreams of being a cowboy. When she began to spend adolescent summers in Wyoming during the 1960s, her world changed forever, as she fell under the spell of natural wonder in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Only later did she recognize her feelings as a response to what nineteenth-century Romantics called the sublime. A vintage 1916 picture postcard of Golden Gate Canyon by F. Jay Haynes inspired this project. When Pritchard turned it over and read the message – “I cannot describe the Yellowstone as the dictionary is only a book. It is more than scenery. In some places, it is so beautiful that the men take off their hats, and the women are silent!” – she was back in a childhood place of wonder tempered by a lifetime of work as an artist and teacher in landscape photography.Formed by fire and ice, embraced by a nation seeking an ancient past with a future as grand as the landscapes it inhabited, Yellowstone was established as the world’s first national park by an Act of Congress in 1872. One hundred fifty years later, the park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem continue to occupy an iconic role in the public imagination of Yellowstone as a place that is both real and ideal. Here, in this complex ecosystem where wild nature and culture meet, the complexities of our relationship to the natural world are revealed unlike any other place.Yellowstone is truly unique, and each generation who visits it invests Yellowstone with ideas, beliefs, and values reflecting its historical moment. In More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, Janet Pritchard surveys these relationships with her captivating photographs and insightful text, and Lucy R. Lippard’ sets the table with her heartfelt introduction to the world’s romance with Yellowstone. This book reveals why Yellowstone is so important to American and the world and how its landscapes reflect more than scenery.

The National Park Service was established by an act of Congress in 1916 to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” This directive to protect wilderness yet provide accessibility to it without somehow compromising the integrity of the natural resources seems to be a self-fulfilling contradiction and an arena for conflicting priorities.In Park Place, photographer David Heberlein explores the tension between access and enjoyment and preservation of America’s public lands. From 1992 to 2019, he traveled throughout the American West and visited thirty-five national parks, monuments, and recreation areas. His stunning photographs, made in the course of his many journeys, document the human presence within the national parks and monuments of the American West. They allude to human influence both through the marks we make on the land – whether temporary or permanent – and through the presence of visitors who appear in numerous shapes and sizes performing a variety of familiar sightseeing activities. These shifting scenarios provide compelling photographic documentation of the multiple roles that national parks and monuments play and the ongoing need to balance the human impact on nature with the preservation of wild places.Park Place features sixty-four duotone photographs by David Heberlein along with an introductory essay by the photographer and an afterword. It promises to be a welcome addition to a longstanding tradition of artists, writers, and photographers heading out West to see and explore and interpret America’s national treasures.

Varanasi, also known as Kashi and Banaras, is a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh dating to the 11th century B.C.E. Regarded as the spiritual capital of India, the city draws Hindu pilgrims who bathe in the Ganges River’s sacred waters for prayer and ritual. In Varanasi, one is in a time warp where one is living in history as if time has never stopped, for the people, both residents and pilgrims, continue their daily practices and worship in ways relatively unchanged for millennia, a continuum of thousands of years. Being in Varanasi is like being on a thread pulled from a cloth that dates back to the beginning of time. Here, one doesn’t “see” a ruin, as one does in other ancient civilizations, but a living city where history hasn’t stopped. David Scheinbaum guides us, with his camera, through the city’s winding streets that are filled with thousands of shrines and temples at virtually every turn. He takes us on an incredible visual journey to the Ganges, the sacred river where bathers are in prayer, and to the funerary Ghats, steps that lead down to the river where cremations take place, filling the air with incense and burning pyres. Hindus believe that being cremated along the banks of the holy Ganges allows one to break the cycle of death and rebirth and attain Moksha, (salvation) making it a major center for pilgrimages. David Scheinbaum’s beautiful, soulful photographs present an ancient, holy city immersed in prayer. Woven through are the words of B. J. Miller and Diana L. Eck, noted scholars and writers who each shed light on the special qualities that make Varanasi the holy city it has always been.

In 1998, Kevin Bubriski was fortunate to spend time with the Uyghurs in Kashgar, their ancient city on the Silk Road in Xinjiang, China. While there, he made unforgettable photographic portraits and street scenes that reveal a haunting beauty and sense of the past in old Kashgar. Bubriski was drawn to the faces of ordinary people and their daily lives, with the intent that through photographs mutual understanding between people might be fostered. Although 1998 was an uncomfortable time of rapid transformation for the Uyghurs, their oasis city in the high desert was still vibrant, even as the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown was about to commence. In the last few years, up to a million Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education camps” while others have been subjected to forced sterilizations and wider persecution. The vibrancy, beauty, and grit that Bubriski witnessed and photographed more than two decades ago has irrevocably changed. The Uyghur cultural, economic, familial, religious, and spiritual traditions are captured in Bubriski’s images and the extensive text by Tahir Hamut Izgil and the late Dru Gladney. These traditions, interwoven in Uyghurs’ lives and community for more than two millennia, have been severely impacted by the overt and disastrous policies of the Chinese government’s crackdown on Uyghur civil, spiritual, and cultural activities. The Uyghur community is now fractured and split due to widespread surveillance, mass detentions, and incarcerations. This book is also presented in a bilingual edition so that it is not only accessible to Uyghur people living in non-English-speaking regions of the world, but a way for Uyghurs around the world to reaffirm their cultural and social identity wherever they now live. As many Uyghur families are now separated due to detentions or flight to asylum elsewhere, the book is meant to be an enduring gift for the Uyghur people and for all who wish to understand better Uyghur culture and history. Bubriski’s book is a stunning work of art that reveals an earlier time when Kashgar, beloved city of the Uyghurs, retained much of its traditional life and charm.

Climate change is the great existential reality of our time. How we approach this crisis will affect life on Earth for present and future generations. In spite of our collective ideals, irreversible damage to the environment is imminent and represents urgent local and global concern. Through artfully rendered photographs of an acutely endangered landscape, Oceano: An Elegy for the Earth explores the deep paradox between the devout, powerful presence of nature and environmental loss and damage.Extending eighteen miles along Central California’s famed coastline and divided into both a natural preserve and a state vehicular recreation area, the Oceano Dune complex has long fascinated photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward and Brett Weston. The ephemeral, ever-changing landscape here expresses a sublime order and reflects many correlations between land and the dynamics of human society. Using metaphors that inspire hope and explore impermanence and darkness contrasted with the purity of suffusing light, Ulrich’s photographs have been likened to Mark Rothko’s “silence and solitude” that express the resonance and subtle dimensions of consciousness.The coastal environment of the Oceano Dunes is tempered by multiple threats such as incessant motorized activity, the toxicity of surrounding industrial-scale agriculture, and some of the worst air quality in the nation. Thus, for the book’s sequence of images, the photographer employs the literary form of an elegy, an extended reflection and lamentation on Earth during the early twenty-first century. An elegy refers to a poetic reflection of sorrow and love, often for a transient, mortal entity. As Ulrich writes: “Sorrow and love for Earth, indeed. No better articulation exists for my regard for our dying planet and common mother.”

Travels across the Roof of the World provides a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of this vast region, from the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan through Afghanistan's fabled Hindu Kush, the Karakoram in Pakistan, and the Great Himalaya Range that stretches across northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. Unique in scope among photo books on the Himalaya, Travels across the Roof of the World chronicles William and Anne Frej's more than twenty pilgrimages throughout the area spanning forty years and 3,000 miles through some of the world's most remote and difficult-to-reach country. Inspired by the devotion to the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in the villagers they met on their first trek to Nepal in 1981, they set out on a quest to document Asia’s highest peaks as well as the lives of the resilient people living in these remote mountain communities. When they began, trekkers from the West through these regions were few. Even now, trips are demanding - but not nearly as harsh as the daily lives of the residents, who continue to exist in a kind of stunning isolation that has allowed them to maintain the rich cultural traditions and spiritual practices that have sustained them over many centuries. Edwin Bernbaum’s essay adds to the depth of the pictures, with his focus on the symbolism, religious importance, and associated legends of these sacred places. The authors also share extensive vignettes about the places they saw and how they have changed over time.

The Schuylkill River flows more than 100 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to the Delaware River. It passes through five counties - Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia - and its valley is home to more than three million people, yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards. Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816. In the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled - but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it? Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she traveled upriver repeatedly to bushwhack along the riverbanks and to row and paddle in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of a bold industrial innovation that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry and obstructive dams meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, from Pottsville to Reading, Birdsboro to Phoenixville, Bridgeport to Philadelphia. Along with Sorlien's full-color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all. Inland is the first to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.

Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land is an art book that engages with history. Featuring photographs of dwellings and vernacular structures found in rural Massachusetts, the book is a meditation on the human occupation of land, with an emphasis on the long presence of Indigenous people and the waves of settlement by people from other countries that began during the early 1600s and continues today.Utilizing a muted colour palette, Matthews's photographs of both structures and historical markers are subtle and haunting. They suggest the presence of histories, embedded in the landscape but often invisible. Although the book is focused on Massachusetts, it implicitly raises larger issues of settlement and nationhood. How did the United States of America come to occupy its land? How is this story told? As a longtime occupant/occupier of Massachusetts herself, Matthews aims to understand more deeply the land on which she lives.The main text of the book comes from photographs of historic markers, which were installed around the state at different times by different interest groups. The words on these markers describe early relations between Indigenous people and largely English settlers, from diverse points of view. In this way, the book explores how difficult histories are written and how they change over time. Concluding essays by Indigenous activist David Brule and poet Suzanne Gardinier provide important perspectives as well, connecting the past and future. Occupying Massachusetts is a moving story whose message will be appreciated for years to come.

Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two. David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books - Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way. In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton's magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.

Landfill is a collection of eye-opening photographs by Brett Kallusky, taken in California's historic Santa Maria Valley, one of the world’s great wine-growing areas. This body of work, however, directs our attention to a small section of the landscape: to the entwined systems of vast agricultural production and the waste it creates. The photographs reveal scenes that are literally hidden from public view and knowledge, underscoring their nature as evidentiary documentation: a microcosm with ramifications far beyond its geographical boundaries. Kallusky's interest does not end there, for his depiction of this famous Central California landscape creates an opportunity for contemplative reflection of our complicit involvement, if only by eating the strawberries, carrots, and cauliflower that is grown here and transported to grocery stores throughout the U.S. Thus, despite the cool formalism and detached documentary style of the pictures, assembled together as they are in this book, they engage in an extended consideration, drawing viewers into a new relationship with this place. Addressing the current, human-centered epoch known as the Anthropocene, the quiet but powerful imagery of Kallusky's Landfill examines important questions of how the land is used and regarded. The landscape reveals who we are, as he brings these invisible spaces into visibility, showing how the earth supports our food needs on a massive scale, fueling a massive engine of consumption. What is left in the wake of that system to which we all belong?

When winter snows cover Iceland in a sea of white, this volcanic island is transformed into an enchanting visual masterpiece that precariously rests on two tectonic plates in the North Atlantic just below the Arctic Circle. Ironically, the white blanket reveals more clearly the landscape's incredible geological formations and remote human settlements, eliciting a natural human response of wonderment. David Freese's profound, ongoing concern for our environmental predicament is once again manifested in his photographs of Iceland. By showing us what humankind is on the brink of losing, his images share and preserve his vision of this unique and special place.The award-winning Icelandic novelist, poet, and playwright Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir contributes a heartfelt afterword that adds her voice to the persistent warnings and alarms that have gone unheeded by too many for too long. As a citizen of Iceland, her testimony is that of a compelling witness. A small jewel of a book, Iceland Wintertide becomes a powerful coda to David Freese's Trilogy of North American Waters as the threats and ramifications of a warming climate steadily increase before our eyes. His photographs provide an added inspiration to act even in the face of those who purposefully deny only to protect their special interests.