Through 150 striking color photographs, Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs charts the road to Barack Obama's nomination as the first African American to lead the presidential ticket of a major party. Announcing his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, Obama stood on the grounds of the Old State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous "House Divided" speech against slavery in 1858. During an eighteen-month campaign, from the snows of Iowa to the hunt for Democratic "superdelegates," this junior senator from Chicago confounded the party establishment and rewrote the playbook on modern presidential campaigning. This amazing collection of photographs captures the public and private moments of his journey, and offers a unique window into one of the great triumphs in American politics.

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Long overlooked in American culture, African American beauty finally get its due in this landmark work. As a student in the 1970s, Deborah Willis came to the realization that images of black beauty, female and male, simply did not exist in the larger culture. Determined to redress this imbalance, Willis examined everything from vintage ladies’ journals to black newspapers, and started what would become a lifelong quest. With more than two hundred arresting images, many previously unpublished, Posing Beauty recovers a world many never knew existed. Historical subjects such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker illuminate the past; Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali take us to the civil rights era; Denzel Washington, Lil’ Kim, and Michelle Obama celebrate the present. Featuring the works of more than one hundred photographers, including Carl van Vechten, Eve Arnold, Lee Friedlander, and Carrie Mae Weems, Willis’s book not only celebrates the lives of the famous but also captures the barber shop, the bodybuilding contest, and prom night. Posing Beauty challenges our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be “beautiful.”
242 duotone photographs; 40 pages of five-color photographs....

A stunning, visual biography of Michelle Obama that finally puts her phenomenal fame into a cultural and historical context we can all understand. There has never been a First Lady like her before. While there have been a slew of Obama celebrity books, none contain the message of Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard’s eye-opening book. With nearly 200 compelling photographs, these two noted scholars capture Michelle Obama’s dramatic transformation from working mother to First Lady, from her first tentative steps on the campaign trail to her spontaneous hug of the Queen, to her fairy-tale-like “date night” on Broadway. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has there been a First Lady who has so enchanted America, but in her down-to-earth dealings with all Americans—schoolchildren, military families, and home gardeners alike—and in her diverse fashion taste, from J. Crew to Jason Wu, Michelle Obama is inexplicably all pearls, all business, all mother. The authors show how Michelle Obama represents the culmination of America’s evolving views on women, race, motherhood, and beauty. Much more than a mere catalog of style, Michelle Obama is a remarkable pictorial story of one woman’s hold on our imagination. 150 full-color photographs....