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This 1909 publication is a photograph collection of aerial views of the city of Paris and other notable nearby sites, like Versailles. The photographers, A. Schelcher and A. Omer-Decugis, produced about thirty pictures using an oblique point of view and provide a different visual of monuments like the Eiffel Tower in a perpendicular photograph. These photos show the streets and boulevards of Paris captured at a time when aerial photography was in an experimental stage and the results helped alter human perceptions of the world.

How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel is the culmination of research on gospel music undertaken by Horace Clarence Boyer, a gospel singer and pioneering scholar on the subject. Boyer skillfully combines the history of gospel music and its social context, tracking the development gospel from its early stages during its golden age (1945-55), into the 1960s, when the music form began to take its place in American popular music. Photographer Lloyd Yearwood’s rare photos of performances and backstage activity further enhance the written history.

In 2001, British artist Jeremy Deller received a residency from the CCAC Wattis Institute in San Francisco. He applied his honorarium toward a used Jeep and five acres of land in the Mojave Desert for $2000, thereby staking his own claim upon the Golden State. His fellowship resulted in an unorthodox but compelling guidebook tracing California’s history from the 19th century mining boom to the post-dot-com recession, as found along its dusty highways and in its roadside museums.

The International Exposition of 1867 (Exposition universelle de 1867), was the second world's fair to be held in Paris and featured 703 exhibitors from the United States. This volume includes 17 highly detailed black and white photographs credited to M. Léon and J. Levy. These featured American technology-themed exhibits such as the McCormick reaper from Chicago, Weed Sewing Machine Co., W.D. Andrews & Bro. steam and gas engines, and Smiths NY Ales displaying many more than 99 bottles of beer on the wall!

Controversy and Hope is an immersion into not only the 54-mile Voting Rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, but also a view into a range of civil rights events from 1960 to 1965. Photojournalist James Karales was also an acquaintance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With over 500 photographs dating from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, Black: A Celebration of a Culture exhibits the vivacious landscape of black culture not only in America, but also around the world.

Tiles and ceramics produced in Iznik between the 15^th and 17^th centuries represent a significant artistic achievement for Turkey. Tiles were frequently used as decoration in Turkish Seljuk period (1071-1243 AD) architecture for important public buildings. Beginning with the Ottomans in the 15^th century, there was increasing demand for tiles, which were used to decorate the mosques and palaces of their new capital of Istanbul.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.

In this fascinating biography of the Smithsonian Castle, Castle Curator Rick Stamm delves into over 150 years of stories about the people who worked (and lived) in this iconic building. The book features many photos of the Castle, from its Victorian beginnings to modern day, and gives the reader deep insight into how the Smithsonian Institution was created and how it grew to become the venerable cultural institution that it is today. 

“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology.