| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Currier & Ives: America Imagined. By Bryan F. Le Beau. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. x, 380 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-56098-990-4.)

Currier & Ives prints have always been an important if unexamined part of America's visual heritage. When the Iowa artist Grant Wood wanted to show that his Dinner for Threshers (1934) captured an authentic slice of Americana, he hung a once-popular Currier & Ives lithograph on the wall of the farmer's dining room. In the 1930s and 1940s, when it became vital for intellectuals and John Q. Public alike to find some usable past—some common heritage—to which to cling in troubled times, Harry T. Peters's book of Currier & Ives reproductions, in its several editions, became the first coffee-table book to displace the illustrated Bible in American homes. The past we see in the mind's eye today comes in large part from the workshop of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, nineteenth-century purveyors of what they called "Cheap and Popular Prints" for the masses.

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