"Resurrecting scores of little-known images of the nineteenth-century American West, Print the Legend offers engaging tales of ambitious photographic adventurers, missing photographs, and misinterpreted images. Chronicling both the history of a place and the history of a medium, this book tells the story of how Americans first came to understand western photographs and, consequently, to envision their expanding nation."--Jacket.

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent Newport family: for thirteen years he lived a double life - as the celebrated white Clarence King and as James Todd, a black Pullman porter and steelworker. Unable to marry the black...

The catalogue for an unprecedented exhibition opening in June 1996 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Perpetual Mirage is the first fully illustrated history of the desert West and the first full-scale study of one of the most distinctive American publishing traditions - the photographic book. Since the mid-19th century, photographs of the American Southwest - its towering mountains, majestic canyons, and unusual wildlife - have been presented...

This book brings together the work of twenty-eight leading western historians who explore this area from a dazzling number of perspectives. They provide insightful portraits of the West as a distinctive place of many peoples and of many terrains. The authors provide important insights about many long-standing controversies, and they offer not only the fruits of the latest thinking about the West, but also a vivid sense of how people actually lived.--...