AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

A pictorial interpretation of Bates’ “America the Beautiful.”

Few will question the aesthetic beauty of Minor’s paintings, which employ breathtaking realism to depict a diversity of landscapes in the continental U.S. Minor chooses sites ranging from the “purple mountain majesty” of Grand Teton National Park (first appearing on the front jacket) to a moving illustration for the line “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears!” that shows the Empire State Building illuminated in red, white, and blue with twin columns of light in the background. Throughout, Minor also varies his settings between the contemporary era and the past, selectively including people in some art. Unfortunately, herein lies a romanticizing of American history that is reliant on exclusion and erasure. The cover image of the Tetons is reused on the recto of an interior spread and expanded to a facing verso depicting three lone tepees, smoke rising from their tops. Such imagery risks relegating Indigenous people to the past and reinforces the myth of historically sparse Native populations—especially when juxtaposed with a scene of “pilgrim[s]” at Plimouth Plantation and another with a covered wagon moving through Nebraska. A spread with the figures on Mount Rushmore exalted as “heroes… / Who more than self their country loved / And mercy more than life” further whitewashes America’s history of settler colonialism and slavery.

Both beautiful and deeply flawed, like its subject.