Americana Books
River Falls Public Library


July features Americana 
books and links!

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
---Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855 edition) Preface



Haunted America
by Michael Norman and Beth Scott

133.10973 Sco
Haunted America will take you on a grand tour of ghostly haunting through the US and Canada, sweeping you from the terrifying battlefield specters at Little Big Horn to a vaudeville palace in Tampa, from ghostly apparitions in President Garfield's home in Ohio to the White House in Washington, DC.

The Foxfire Book
edited by Eliot Wigginton

390.09 Wig

1n 1966, during his first year of teaching ninth and tenth grade English at a 250-pupil high school in the Appalachian Mountains of Northeastern Georgia, Wigginton and his students founded a quarterly magazine they named Foxfire, after a phosphorescent lichen.  The magazine featured interviews by students with the older community residents about Appalachian traditions, folklore, and material culture.  In 1972, a selection of articles from the magazine was published in book form and the Foxfire Book, and multi-volume series, was born.  A wonderful collection of folk wisdom and a positive philosophy of what is basic to life.

This Old Farm: A Treasury of Family Farm Memories
edited by Michael Dregni

630.97 Thi

Filled with wonderful, heart-warming stories, essays, and great photography and artwork recounting life on the family farm, this book provides an entertaining, yet educational, mirror into the past.

The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger

709.73 Dav

The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum is home to America's most important and wide ranging collection of the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts that have flourished in this country since our earliest days.  Brilliantly photographed and discussed are: seventeen of the famous period rooms; furniture of four centuries; lamps, dished, vessels, and ornamental pieces of many different materials; and paintings, prints, drawings, and watercolors spanning the history of the nation.

Early American Herb Recipes
by Alice Cooke Brown

641.6 Bro

Over 500 authentic herb recipes reproduced exactly as they appeared in their original sources.  Includes are recipes for medicinals, beverages, confections, conserves, dyes, fish, fowl, furniture polish, gravies and sauces, insecticides, meat, pastries, cakes and pies, puddings, pickles, salads, soup, spot removers, toiletries, perfumes, pomatum, vegetables and vinegar.  The recipes, sometimes quaint, but always serious, reflect the tremendous importance of herbs to the survival of our forefathers. and afford factual insight into vital aspects of early American life from the 18th century through the Civil War.

The Old Barn Book: A Field Guide to North American Barns and Other Farm Structures
by Allen Noble and illustrations by M. Margaret Geib

728.922 Nob

From hat barns to corn cribs, from fences to chicken coops, from silos to outhouses, this book's clear drawings, photos, maps, and descriptions make it easy to figure out what's around a farm.  Special lists tell you what kinds of farm buildings to look for in each part of the US and Canada.

American Folk Sculpture
by Robert Bishop

735.2 Bis

All who are interested in the world of art will find in this book reasons why American folk sculpture demands such devoted interest.  Folk sculpture is uniquely American.  At its best it is an honest and straightforward expression of the spirit of a people.

American Ballads & Folk Songs
collected and compiled by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax

784.4 Lom

An American classic collection of folk music.  Included are sections on working the railroad, the levee camp, songs from Southern chain gangs, songs from the mountains, the blues, reels, songs of childhood, cowboy songs, the miner, the Erie Canal, sailors and sea fights, wars and soldiers, spirituals, and many more.  A must for anyone interested in American folk music.

A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Speilberg, Altman
by Robert Kolker

791.43 Kol

In this twentieth anniversary edition, Kolker continues his inquiry into the cinematic representations of culture by updating and revising the chapters on these directors to include their most important works since 1988.  Placing the films of these influential artist in an ideological perspective, the author both illuminates their relationship to one another and to the larger currents in our culture and emphasizes the statements their films make about American society.

Television in America: a Pictorial History
by Thomas G. Aylesworth

791.45 Ayl

An illustrated overview of American television  including chapters on variety shows, situation comedies, crime shows, science fictions shows, adventure shows, dramas, soaps, westerns, children's shows, doctor shows, games shows, and the news.

The Stars and the Stripes: the American Flag as Art and as History from the Birth of the Republic to the Present
by Bolesaw and Marie-Louise D'Otrange Mastai

929.9 Mas

Shows us our national flag, in all its various and surprising incarnations through two hundred years, as folk art, as a profoundly moving expression of the feelings of generations of Americans about the vents and spirit of the growth of the country.  Like the masterpieces of quilting and other American folk arts, the old handmade flags display an amazing freedom of color and design.

America Then and Now
by Sherry Marker

973 Mar

By contrasting the photographs of the present with those of the past, this book show how much the nation has changed.  Here are the monuments of the past that have survived the years, but whose current surroundings reflect the intervening decades.  A visual guide to our history, from the ever-changing skyline of Manhattan to the hardly changed streets of Deadwood.  The images collected here give the reader a perspective on America's past and a unique understanding of how it became our future.

Vanishing Breed: Photographs of the Cowboy and the West
by William Albert Allard
978 All
The 104 color photographs in this book offer an intimate and revealing portrait of the cowboy, whose real nature has long been obscured by myth and make-believe.  Captured by Allard's camera is the true spirit of the American west: cowboys spattered with mud after a spill from a bucking saddle-bronco, rodeo queens before a beauty contest, a lone rider galloping across a rugged landscape of sagebrush and mountains.