American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture

by Shawn Michelle Smith

Book Overview

Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691004781
• ISBN13: 9780691004785
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"