The American Past: A History of the United States from Concord to Hiroshima, 1775-1945: Told with the Aid of a Thousand Pictures, Reproduced from Original Photographs, Paintings, Cartoons, Lithographs, Engravings, Especially Selected and Arranged to Illu…

512 pp. Profusely illustrated with many photographs, drawings, and political cartoons. "The story behind this book is brief. A few years ago I set out to buy a book on America which made a comprehensive use of the pictorial material with which our history abounds. I did not find what I was looking for, and I undertook the idea myself. The American Past, I believe, contains more pictures from more different sources than any single volume of American history ever published. Yet I do not like to think of it primarily as a 'picture history.' Pictures can lie, and often do; it might almost be argued that nothing can lie so effectively as a picture! A carefully chosen picture can distort almost any fact. By the same token, some pictures can tell the truth in a way that words are powerless to match. I have tried to include as many such pictures as I could find." -- from the foreword