An ambitious book that does not try to give an exhaustive photographic history of the United States but draws on the Magnum Photos archive to sketch a compelling visual portrait of the country, past and present. From the founding of the agency, as the editor Laura Wexler writes in her introduction, Magnum photographers meant to show what they observed and not what was commissioned by publishers whose interests rested on market research; the pictures here reflect what they found along the way. The book is organised in chapters by decade, starting in the forties when Magnum was founded after the war, from which point photography and the American empire developed together. Each section crosses a decade of history, showing the moments that mark those years through the eye and the particular language of one photographer at a time; there are also collective reportages that focus more closely on a major event — the civil rights struggles, the eleventh of September — and wide-ranging individual assignments in which authors followed a story for months or years. Presenting the history and the images of all fifty states, the book invites us to consider America as an empire, with its military and political adventures and misadventures abroad, among them Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the soft power and the self-image the country has offered through popular culture.