From the introduction to TIME magazine's new book Time America: An Illustrated History
Perhaps the most memorable argument for creating a visual history of America was made by the notorious political master of late-19th century New York City, William (Boss) Tweed, who was outraged by the unflattering images of him created by editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast. "I don't care so much what the papers say," Tweed complained. "My constituents can't read, but damn it, they can see pictures!"
Telling America's story in pictures is a particularly American thing to do. For those of us who have grown up in the 20th century, American history seems like an epic newsreel set to a jazz and rock-'n'-roll soundtrack. From images of Washington crossing the Delaware to Lincoln in a top hat, from Babe Ruth clowning with an adoring kid to Martin Luther King Jr. marching for voting rights in Selma, Ala., we construct our own mental narrative of America in iconic images. For more than 80 years, TIME has helped tell that story with pictures that are both timely and timeless.
At the heart of that story is the American Dream, a dream far older than America itself. Centuries before Christopher Columbus' voyages, cartographers placed the New World on European maps. America really was something new under the sun-not only a new land but also a new set of ideas. The 18th century French-American author Hector St. John de CrŠvecoeur made that connection explicit when he called the American citizen the "New Man."
In telling-and showing-the story of this New World, this book reflects an idea that TIME has always embraced: that of American exceptionalism. Unlike the nations of Europe, Americans were never bound by a common blood, background or religion. We were connected by an uncommon set of ideas, articulated so memorably by Thomas Jefferson in the nation's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, that no man is above the law and that democracy derives its power from the consent of the governed. As Bono, the Irish rock star, likes to say, America is not so much a country as an idea.
That idea got its start 400 years ago in the settlement at Jamestown. This first permanent British colony in America not only established a foothold on this continent, but it also helped create the dna of what it means to be an American. It established a template for representative government and capitalistic democracy, and it contained in embryo almost all the struggles and contradictions that have been at the heart of American history ever since. The European settlers, Native Americans and African slaves who came together in Jamestown's early years embodied the conflicts that would haunt America to the present day: the tension between liberty and equality, between the individual and the community, between isolationism and engagement, between man and nature, between North and South. At the same time, the Jamestown colony gave birth to one of the ideals that has helped us reckon with these tensions and trials ever since: the abiding quest for liberty and freedom.
The book also mirrors the ways in which American history at every stage was transformed by technology, from the long rifle of the colonists to the cannons of the Civil War to the railroad that opened up commerce and the American West. Walt Whitman said democracy would create its own art forms, and it did, in a series of innovative formats: photography, radio, film, television and now the World Wide Web.
The earliest images of America were painted landscapes that displayed to the Old World what the New World looked like. But it was that most democratic of arts, photography, that would bring America alive to the rest of the world. From the grim images of the battlefield at Antietam, which first showed the horror of modern warfare, to the bleak scenes of the Depression to the flag being raised on Iowa Jima, photography became America's signature art form, one that was accessible to all.
We tend to think of history as being written in stone. But history, like science, is not static but dynamic. It is changed not only by new discoveries but also by the perspectives of the present. This book is less a history than a brisk newsreel of the great sweep of the American narrative. Whitman celebrated himself as a microcosm of America, and these pages celebrate the high and the lows of the American experience. "I contain multitudes," Whitman boasted, and so does this book: multitudes of ideas, of people and places, of disasters and dreams, all of which form a teeming mosaic of American life and history. After all, as Whitman wrote, "the United States is essentially the greatest poem." We just combined that poetry with pictures.