While reading this book, I found myself doing what I do at art museums: reading the captions scrupulously and glancing at the pictures. The images are a well-chosen assortment of maps, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, posters, movie stills, etc, but I was more interested in the tiny biographies of artists, factoids about famous artifacts (e.g. the flag-raising at Iwo Jima photograph was not staged), and other little bites in the captions. ( )

If you like this book, check out the Library of Congress' American Memory website. It is an amazing archive of American history and culture and includes photographs, documents, motion pictures, sheet music, sound recordings, etc. There are over 100 collections in their database and more are being added. Some of the images in this book are in the collections.