Looking Backward
A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
26 May 2017
Description
Haunting views of the early twentieth century’s most significant events flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern world.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the stereograph was king. Its binocular images revealed the world in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of stereographic views, Michael Lesy presents images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago.
Lesy’s evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today.
Reviews
"The author is one of America's leading photographic historians and so a collection of images selected by him is going to appeal to the professional eye as well as the more casual enquiring reader... A fascinating collection, annotated in great detail, and certainly food for thought and meditation." — State Media
Also By: Michael Lesy 
Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
E Book, 2015
"Vivid, laconic, and crisp. The bodies fall like dominoes, and every word sounds like it was shot from a gun. And as you might expect from Lesy, the photographs are extraordinary." —Luc Sante
Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910
Hardback, 2013
What we ate, how we ate, and how eating changed during America’s first real food revolution, 1900–1910.
Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910
E Book, 2013
What we ate, how we ate, and how eating changed during America’s first real food revolution, 1900–1910.
Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
Paperback, 2008
"Vivid, laconic, and crisp. The bodies fall like dominoes, and every word sounds like it was shot from a gun. And as you might expect from Lesy, the photographs are extraordinary." —Luc Sante
Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943
Hardback, 2002
Over 400 rarely or never-seen photographs of a vanished America.