The histories of the North American West and photography have been intertwined since photography reached America. From the middle of the 19th century, images of the West have continuously played a significant role in defining the ways the region is perceived not only within America but around the world. Eye on the West presents the work of seventeen contemporary photographers of the West, including David Plowden, Laura McPhee, Miguel Gandert, Karen Halverson, Toba Tucker, Richard Buswell, John Willis, David Ottenstein, Lauren Henkin, and Will Wilson. Beautiful reproductions of 34 photographs are accompanied by brief essays by George Miles and by the artists themselves, contributing to multiple conversations about how visual art continues to reflect and shape our understanding of Western American society, culture, and politics. Distributed for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Exhibition Schedule: The Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Yale University (09/01/18-12/16/18)

From California to the Klondike, prospector Holly Skinner follows a trail of gold across the nineteenth -century American West. Living in a ghost town on Wyoming's South Pass, she steps back into a world where gold ruled the passions of those who pursued it and changed the shape of the nation that found it. In a style reminiscent of John McPhee, Skinner weaves the story of her own solitudinous search for the precious metal into her accounts of the gold rushes that so dramatically accelerated the westward movement.

This collection of photographs from the last three decades by Western writer and photographer Nancy Wood captures the people and places of rural Colorado and New Mexico.

A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman Empire Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity. Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.

According to West, creative visual thinkers (many of whom have had difficulty with verbal skills), aided by computers, will be at the forefront of innovation in a dramatically changing society.

Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets-settlers and native people-and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses. Far as the Eye Can See is the story of life in a place where every minute is an engagement in a kind of war of survival, and how two people-a white man and a mixed-race woman-in the midst of such majesty and violence can manage to find a pathway to their own humanity. Robert Bausch is the distinguished author of a body of work that is lively and varied, but linked by a thoughtfully complicated masculinity and an uncommon empathy. The unique voice of Bobby Hale manages to evoke both Cormac McCarthy and Mark Twain, guiding readers into Indian country and the Plains Wars in a manner both historically true and contemporarily relevant, as thoughts of race and war occupy the national psyche.