America By Another Name:
Photos and Stories of the Road and a History that United Us
Overview
America By Another Name: Photos and Stories of the Road and a History that United Us puts the reader in the passenger seat of my tricked-out 2012 camper van for a voyage in photographs and words—from Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida—to places in our nation that go by the name of Columbia. Most of us have never thought about Columbia, but as another name for the United States (and more), Columbia was a word that symbolized national unity amidst our diversity.
The rich history of this name has sent me on multiple journeys totaling well over 160,000 miles to more than 65 American places called Columbia. Whether it’s a street, town, city, county, or river, I’ve been there, photographing a panoply of American people and their environments. Around this time of our nation’s founding and with so many Americans deliberating over our nation’s purpose and future, my book’s time has come.
Starting off slowly in 1738 as a somewhat satirical and rebellious name for the 13 Colonies, then gaining steam in the 1770s and then through the 1920s, Columbia was used by poets, songwriters, orators, and even everyday people as a sort of poetic nickname for the United States. As the American Revolution’s crisis of identity and confidence took hold, a young, formerly enslaved African American poet of Boston named Phillis Wheatley wrote a poem to George Washington in which she conceived a new, classically inspired and very American goddess of liberty that she named Columbia. This new goddess, to be known variously as Lady Columbia or Miss Columbia, combined qualities of both the general and Wheatley. My book will include public domain images that display the rise and fall of this national guardian spirit.
I also show how, starting in 1777, the hymn “Ode to Columbia” so heartened Continental soldiers with its bright vision for their new country that, years later, the war’s veterans spread this poetic nickname across the land. The song also made Columbia a symbol of liberty, union, and progress—a set of hard-to-define cultural values that would inform our perennial struggle to build a national identity from diverse peoples. And then when disunity threatened in the 1790s, the song “Hail, Columbia” reminded citizens of their common purpose and became our de facto national anthem until officially replaced in 1931 by “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
As I ventured to capture the lives of our fellow countrymen living in various gradations of poverty and riches, precarity and safety, I kept Columbia’s values in mind: How does this person experience liberty, or the unity of this country, or this thing we call progress? Gathered in these pages even as on this land, I show the reader experiences and identities that seem disparate, and for some, antagonistic: nudists and the Knights of Columbus; evangelical Christians and transgendered women; a white kid in a coonskin cap and Native Americans in regalia; Confederate apologists and a multiracial group on a dais before the National Archives.
In the center of the front row in that National Archives photograph is African American journalist and cultural historian A’Lelia Bundles. In 2006, her biography about her great-great-grandmother, African American hair-care magnate Madam C.J. Walker, revealed to me that some of my paternal ancestors had enslaved Madam Walker’s parents in the antebellum South. In the afterword Bundles writes for America By Another Name, she explores how our shared family histories affect her friendship with me today.
My Columbia journey highlighted for me another detail from Madam Walker’s biography: that these aforementioned paternal ancestors helped settle Columbia, Tennessee. Similarly, my maternal ancestry reveals an anti-Indigenous massacre related to Columbia, Connecticut. It’s only appropriate that the reader witnesses a fellow American trying to make sense of the violent underside of the drive, pluck, and ingenuity that built our nation. While its values of liberty, union, and progress made Columbia a symbol of American idealism, the name sprang from that of the great vanguard of modern empire, Christopher Columbus. We see Columbia embodies the dichotomy between the republican ideal stated in 1776—that all persons are created equal—and the cynicism of our development as a country that displaced and enslaved millions.
My Columbia journey began in 2010 when, amidst the nation’s struggles to recover from the 2008 financial meltdown, my fellow tenants and I were evicted from our building in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As I’d already been eager to create a photobook about American life and culture, my ability to become a digital nomad helped me turn a would-be catastrophe into the trip of a lifetime. I keep the reader oriented in my journey with photo captions and brief introductions to geographically based portfolios. These elements combine with written stories of the road and salient looks at history to enrich the reader’s enjoyment.
Columbia—as goddess; as a name for our nation and for many places locally; as a conflicted symbol of liberty, union, and progress—has helped me reveal a new understanding of who and what we are as a nation, and what we may become in the future. With current events and the U.S. semiquincentennial having us in a reflective mood, now is the time for a book exploring Columbia’s deep significance and potential.
Details / Schedule
The vast majority of this book’s photographs have been taken and edited, and the writings can be done expeditiously.
I look forward to receiving a publishing editor’s notes on filling in photographic gaps in socioeconomic and cultural representation (e.g., Asian Americans, the upper middle class, Jewish and Muslim Americans). Having a publisher will much more readily open the doors of the otherwise reticent individuals and groups.
Positioning
Photography
Travel
Social Sciences
American Studies / History
Pop Culture
Coffee Table
Physical Description
9.5”W x 0.8”D x 12”H
Approximately 150 pages
Color photographs
All images copyright Francis Smith
Historical images in public domain
Author
The minute the training wheels came off his bicycle in 1971, author and photographer Francis Smith was riding way too far from the house.
After studying photography and art history at Vassar College, Smith upgraded his ride to a tiny pickup truck that doubled as a camper and embarked on the first of what would be dozens of road trips across America.
Aside from a successful fundraising campaign in 2014, he’s supported his America By Another Name journey by photographing the homes of art collectors for four different magazines: Native American Art, Western Art Collector, American Fine Art, and American Art Collector. His endeavors afford him diverse encounters with American life—one day photographing at a collector’s home in Malibu, another day at NASCAR, and another at a tin roof shack in Arkansas.
When he’s not pursuing his perennial passions for art and travel, Smith’s love for natural history and for the occasional night of dancing keep him going. He’ll be spending 2025 building his social media presence.