Between 1935 and 1943, a group of photographers under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker set out to photograph the United States for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, however, their work has been reproduced with little discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its creation. "Documenting America" takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the 'ways of seeing' that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism. The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.

In this book the author aims to revolutionize our understanding of Afro-American material culture. Bringing to the essays his extensive research into the written, oral and material sources of Afro-American culture as well on his scholarly knowledge of folklife, social history, anthropology, and art history, Vlach presents the evidence of African influence on Black American folklife, both past and present. The 9 essays in the book are divided into three categories: folk arts and crafts, artisan's lives, and black buildings. They encompass a broad range of folklife, bringing together the fragmented pieces of African as well as Caribbean influence. From South Carolina to Texas, and from Louisiana to Virginia, Vlach provides both general surveys and specific case studies, and focuses not only on artifacts, but on the artisan's role as designer and maker. He examines various manifestations of African culture form direct retentions of African items to stylistic influences inherent in the creative philosophy, in the intellectual premises on which the artifact is designed. The noted stonecarver William Edmonson of Tennessee and contemporary blacksmith Philip Simmons of Charleston are featured, as well as countless other artisans from both past and present. The last 20 years have brought an increased awareness of black America's African heritage, but the lasting influences of African tradition in material culture has been largely overlooked or denied by scholars claiming that slave owners had succeeded in divesting black people of all tangible aspects of the life they had lost. Using multidisciplinary means, Vlach has broken much new ground in this complex cross-cultural experience. He uses unconventional documents to create an alternative history and to demonstrate just how much of African culture was remembered and how rich and vibrant the tradition is.

"My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." So began the first of Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Fireside Chats, which came on the heels of his decision, two days after his inauguration, to close all American banks. During this address, Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio to share his hopes and plans directly with the people. He concluded by encouraging Americans to "tell me your troubles." Roosevelt's invitation was unprecedented, and the enormous public response it elicited signaled the advent of a new relationship between Americans and their president. In this indispensable book, Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine illuminate the period from 1933 to 1938 by setting each of the Fireside Chats in context and reprinting a moving selection of the letters that poured into Washington from an extraordinary variety of ordinary Americans. In his foreword, Michael Kazin examines the achievements and limits of the New Deal and the reasons that FDR remains, for many Americans, the exemplar of a good president. He also highlights the similarities of the 1930s to our era, with its deep recession and a new progressive administration in the White House.

David Grimsted's "Melodrama Unveiled" explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the least common denominator of social values and concerns. In considering both the context and content of popular culture, Grimsted's book suggests how theater reflected the rapidly changing society of antebellum America.

Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, "the greatest sickness of the soul." He thereby is able to "foresee" their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato's extended apologia or defense of Socrates as "a teacher of tyrants" and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such "value judgments" are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronesis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author's inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates. The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.

In this book, 19 prominent representatives of each side in the basic division among Strauss's followers explore his contribution to political philosophy and Jewish thought. The volume presents the most extensive analysis yet published of Strauss's religious heritage and how it related to his work, and includes Strauss's previously unpublished 'Why We Remain Jews, ' an extraordinary essay concerned with the challenge posed to Judaism by modern secular thought. The extensive introduction interrelates the major themes of Strauss's thought

Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, "the greatest sickness of the soul." He thereby is able to "foresee" their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato's extended apologia or defense of Socrates as "a teacher of tyrants" and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such "value judgments" are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronesis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author's inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates. The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.