Time America: An Illustrated History. The editors of Time. New York: Time Inc. Home Entertainment, 2007. Pp. 272. $29.95, oversized cloth. ISBN 10: 1-933821-24-8. TEL: 212-446-5100 • FAX: 212-980-5228

This is a big book—big in size and big in scope. It features more than 500 photographs, paintings and illustrations drawn from the archives of Time and Life magazines, from the U. S. Library of Congress, from state and regional historical societies, and from rarelyseen private collections. The result is a tome with an oversized format, featuring extensive photographic spreads, that chronicles America’s journey from its days as an isolated outpost of the British empire to its current position as the world’s most powerful nation.

Here are the most influential people and important events in five full centuries of American history— from the discovery of the New World and the birth of the nation in 1776, to the horrors of slavery and the Civil War, to the trials and triumphs of the 20th century. We see many images that are embedded in the national consciousness: the flag raising at Iwo Jima; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the landing on the moon in 1969; wounded marines coming to each other’s aid during the battle at Khe Sanh; the Confederate dead at Antietam; the Challenger explosion; the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames.

We also have rare and seldom seen sights that help reveal our national experience: Abraham Lincoln in the crowd at Gettysburg; a young Teddy Roosevelt watching Lincoln’s casket proceed down New York City’s Fifth Avenue; an 1847 daguerreotype of one of Thomas Jefferson’s former slaves; a slave dealer’s store in South Carolina; the aftermath of the Johnstown flood; the outsized face of the Statue of Liberty, photographed before it mounted atop Lady Liberty’s pedestal in New York Harbor; Woody Guthrie’s handwritten lyrics to “This Land is Your Land.”

In addition to the photographs, the book features artifacts that illustrate various facets of American life: paintings by Asher Durand, and Albert Bierstadt; illustrations by Currier & Ives, vintage campaign buttons and advertising signs; New Deal posters and classic book covers, Thomas Jefferson’s original handwritten version of the Declaration of Independence with Benjamin Franklin’s scribbled notations, mingled with such whimsical, telling ephemera as the oldest known pair of Levi Strauss blue jeans, dating to the California Gold Rush, which sold for $46,500 on eBay in 2003.

The book contains mini-essays on it various images and does not shy away from chronicling the conflicts, poverty, and oppression that have accompanied America’s brightest moments.

This book is a reminder why our view of the world, our mental images of the people and events, were shaped to a large degree by the images that appeared in Life magazine.