American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual CultureVisual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as