History of Photography. Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889 by Robert Taft. Reprint.

Dover, 1964. [Reprint of 1938 first edition. One of the classics in the historiography of photography.] Sepia-tone illustrated wraps, may have minor creases in cover, very good or better.  Summary:

Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839–1889 (originally published in 1938 and widely circulated via later editions, including a prominent 1984 reprint) is a seminal work by chemist and historian Robert Taft. Spanning over 500 pages with more than 300 early illustrations, the volume is considered a foundational cornerstone of American photographic historiography. Unlike aesthetic histories that analyze photography strictly as a fine art, Taft’s work approaches the medium as an indispensable recording form and a powerful shaper of national identity, tracing its trajectory across the first 50 years of its existence in the United States.

Taft maps out the evolution of image-making by framing technical breakthroughs as direct drivers of social change. The chronological narrative thoroughly documents the early era of the daguerreotype, its public reception, and the subsequent technological shifts to the ambrotype, tintype, and stereoscope, culminating in the rise of portable film cameras and modern mass-reproduction illustration techniques. Rather than focusing solely on elite studios, the book investigates how photography democratized portraiture through the family album and altered public consciousness by visually chronicling landmark historical events, including the Civil War and the physical expansion of the Western frontier. Through extensive archival research and rigorous factual compilation, Taft establishes photography not as an isolated artistic movement, but as a critical, reflecting lens of nineteenth-century American reality.