"Marni Sandweiss has written splendidly about the American West and an American craft and how the two evolved together. Beyond that, she shows us how much we can learn by studying how Americans, quite literally, have pictured themselves."

--Elliott West, University of Arkansas

"In the West, perhaps more than anywhere else in the United States, Americans think that pictures tell the story, but western photographs are as treacherous as they are compelling. Their seeming simplicity masks their ideological complexity, and no one that I have read conveys their interest and elucidates their complexity and treachery as wonderfully as Marni Sandweiss. This is not a book about debunking the West; it is a book about how the production and consumption of photographs has produced multiple Wests."

--Richard White, Stanford University

"Sandweiss summons the shadows of culture that have hidden behind photographs from the American West. And from this archaeology, she creates noble arguments for a visual literacy just as privileged as any word."

--Dr. Anthony Bannon, Director, George Eastman House

"An engrossing account of the ways in which early photographers created a triumphalist version of the American West. From daguerreotype to wet plate to kodak, from painting to wood cut to lithograph, Professor Sandweiss explores the visual imagery of the West and the westward movement. A pioneering study and a readable story."

--Robert M. Utley, author of Lone Star Legend: The First Century of the Texas Rangers

"Print the Legend provides a fascinating glimpse into the way that photography helped shape our understanding of the American West and, in return, how public myths and legends influenced the approach of photographers."

--David L. Boren, President of the University of Oklahoma and Former United States Senator

"This is one of those remarkable, compelling books that comes along only when a distinguished scholar meets a great subject. No one writes about western photography with more grace and skill than Martha Sandweiss. Print the Legend belongs on that short shelf of essential books about the American West."

--James P. Ronda, Barnard Professor of Western American History, University of Tulsa

Yale University Press Web Site, July, 2005

Winner of the 2002 OAH Ray Allen Billington Prize for the best book in American frontier historyWinner of the 2003 William P. Clements Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America


This prize-winning book tells the intertwined stories of photography and the American West--a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century.