Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America [Hardcover]

"Ever since 1888 and the advent of George Eastman's first Kodak, Americans have been avidly taking pictures to record their lives, creating an enormous, rarely tapped archive. Williams, Richard Cahan, and Nicholas Osborn spent 10 years looking at more than a million snapshots, ultimately choosing 350, each with a "unique ability to help tell the American story." After tracking down the who, what, where, and when of each striking, amusing, or haunting image, the authors organized these everyday astonishments thematically and made every page spread a study in unexpected parallels and contrasts. Beginning with a lovely series taken from "a surrey with the fringe on top" and moving forward into the atomic age, they present scenes of now vanishing wilderness and rural life, people at work and play, and calamities ranging from an eviction to a flood, tornado, dust storm, Ku Klux Klan parade, and war. Assembled with an eye for vitality, irony, and revelation, this splendid American photo album vividly chronicles our progress and tragedies, ingenuity and spirit."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist --Booklist, November 15, 2008

"This photography collection takes us back to the advent of the snapshot in the 1880s and moves on through nearly a century of casual photography. Here's a wonderful combination of technology and nostalgia, of intense connection to the moment and extension through the years. You won't recognize any of the individuals in the snapshots, but you will know them -- lovers and shopkeepers, city and country folk, the meek and the proud -- all in candid display. Give people this book, and you give them the gift of seeing back through time -- and into themselves."

"Who We Were is the most intimate kind of history--the past with all the laughs and chills and hesitations left in, and all the unresolved contradictions as well. It's a lovely collection of amateur photographs, some of them truly inadvertent in their glory, some potential candidates for high-art stature if they were matted and framed. Overall it's as close to a true self-portrait of the American people as you're likely to find between covers."

Since the first snapshots were taken in 1888, Americans have used simple, inexpensive cameras to record their life stories. In the process, they have left behind millions of snapshots that document the story of America. Now, for the first time, these personal photographs have been gathered together to tell the nation's history. From sod houses in South Dakota to the skyscrapers of New York City, these personal photographs form the first people's photo history of America. The snapshots capture nearly a century of American life-telling our story through our own eyes. The Wright Brothers, the World Wars, Woodstock. They are all here, creating a crazy quilt of steamships and biplanes, migrants and flappers, seal clubbers and suffragettes. This is who we were and who we are.