Through December 2, 2016
Sutro Library Reading Room, 5th floor
San Francisco State University Campus, J. Paul Leonard Library - Sutro Library,
5th Floor Reading Room, 1630 Holloway Avenue, SF 94132
For more information on the exhibit: 415-469-6100 or sutro@library.ca.gov.
Parking information
This exhibit examines the Americas as a place of conquest and conflict. "New Western" historians, such as Patricia Limerick, have long spoken about the West as a place where cultures clashed, often violently, and the exhibit attempts to investigate and offer insight into that notion through images, maps, atlases, manuscripts, and books. The oldest book in the exhibit, Cosmographicus (1524), shows the Americas as an island. Americae (1590) by Theador de Bry, illustrates the narratives of European explorers. His drawings of native peoples in the Americas gave Europeans their first glimpse of the "New World" and its inhabitants. The most modern piece in the exhibit is a scrapbook documenting four women during the Jazz Age traveling by car cross-country. Although it would be impossible to examine every aspect of this subject, the exhibit raises questions about the power of print and the ways in which, for centuries, conquest and conflict were reified through books and other documents.
Organized by:
Sutro Library
Spotlight Exhibit Monday, September 12, 2016