Photographs and text provide a portrait of America from 1890 through 1910. Based on a television series by the same name.
In This Was America, photo archivist and historian Martin W. Sandler creates a stunning portrait of America at the turn of the century, when our immediate ancestors, the twentieth century's "founding fathers," were building modern America.
Based on an award-winning television series of the same name, created and produced by Sandler and WCVB-TV, Boston, This Was America weaves two hundred fifty choice photographs (culled from thousands of glass-plate negatives) and a lyrical text into a rich tapestry of the period roughly from 1890 to 1910 that extraordinary time in the nation's history when industrialization and innovation were completely transforming the way Americans worked, played, and viewed themselves.
Turn-of-the-century America was an era of incredible promise and unabashed confidence; its keynote was progress and its testimony was unrelenting change. More than at any other time before or since, Americans were on the move, and the remarkable new age was made even more remarkable by a miraculous new means of recording it: the camera.
By 1900, amateur and professional photographers whose motives ranged from profit and social comment to personal artistic statements, but who all shared a passion for freezing the moment were documenting a way of life that changed by the minute. Their images not only recorded change but brought it about, as a people became acutely conscious of what it meant to be Americans on the brink of a new age.
Reminiscent of The Family of Man in spirit and appearance, This Was America explores the themes in the daily lives of Americans at the turn of the century and gives us a rich, human portrait of our forefathers. In the chapter "On the Move," we see the revolution in transportation that provided one of the period's favorite photographic subjects, as first the railroad and then the automobile epitomized progress for a people who henceforth would measure their freedom in terms of mobility. We see men and women—even young children—working in the cities' offices and factories, plowing fields and felling forests to produce the goods that an emerging middle class would consume at an unprecedented rate.
At the turn of the century, Americans began enjoying newfound leisure, turning play into an art on beaches, on ball fields, and in grandstands. But while industry redefined the economy and science reworked the universe, home and the family remained the bedrock of the nation's values and stability. The treasured portraits preserved in chapter five, "The American Family Album," only hint at the vast changes that were to transform the family as well.
At a time when Americans are reexamining their principles and direction, This Was America pays tribute to those forefathers whose courage and faith forged a heritage of which we can be proud, and honors as well those largely unknown cameramen and -women who compiled a permanent visual document of a magnificent time that will never come again.
For the past twenty-five years, Martin Sandler has been making American history come alive for adults and children alike. A former American-history teacher on the high school and college level, he has authored four major United States' history textbooks, three previous illustrated histories of early American photography, and a nationally broadcast television series, "This Was America," on which this volume is based. His ongoing series "The Story of American Photography" accompanies PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre" and is in its second year now. Sandler lives with his wife, Carol, in Newton, Massachusetts.
—from the dust jacket
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