Casey Nelson Blake '78, a professor of history and American studies at Columbia University, has edited The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and The State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), an essay collection that illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America-beginning with an art market at the turn of the 20th century that supported a notion of civic identity, through the mid-century era of state-sponsored art, to the postmodern disconnect between artistic and civic languages.

Some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields consider such subjects as Norman Rockwell as public artist, the creation of the National Endowment of the Arts visual arts program, the U.S. propaganda offensive from 1945-1959, State Department-sponsored jazz tours with Duke Ellington in the mid-20th century, and religious displays in the 21st century.  This essay collection with more than 40 historical photographs should prove valuable for future study in the complex and interwoven histories of artistic expression, values, ideology, statecraft, and democratic aspiration.