Reflections

Two images and essays capture the author’s reflections on the Obama legacy and on the significance of hatred in American political culture.

American Studies Road Trip

This chapter covers the documentarian’s reflections on the experience of his travels—what it felt like to be in the contested spaces of Obama’s America, from Seattle, to Tucson, to New Orleans, to Gainesville, to Allentown, to New York.

Space Available

This chapter documents empty storefronts in cities and towns across North America that stood as a most visible and poignant public expression of the scale of economic distress.

Barack Obama, the Icon

This chapter gathers and analyzes the popular iconography of Obama during his presidency—in posters, bumper stickers, vernacular murals, street signs, and consumer products. The popular images attest to a national hunger to tell a new story about America that casts off the history of white supremacy.

I Want My Country Back

This chapter contains images and analysis of the emergent politics of white dispossession and grievance in response to the nation’s first African American president—a precursor of Trumpism.

Afterword

The only section of the book written after the 2016 election, this afterword provides the author’s reflections on the exercise of thinking historically about the present—and using a camera to do it—and on the rise of what we now know as Trumpism.

At the Crossroads of Hope and Despair

This chapter offers a study of the early Obama years against the backdrop of national optimism and the darkness of the Great Recession. Images capture street protests, good humor, and political division against a backdrop of economic devastation and distress.

What the Camera Teaches

This introduction lays out some general premises regarding the historical imagination and the work that the camera can do as an instrument of historical thinking.