How Defunding the Arts Wrought Civic Disintegration

America was an empty mall. America was shoddy caulk oozing from a vinyl arc in a historic heatwave. America was a brutishly redacted Frederick Douglass speech on foam posterboard in a tractor trailer Freedom Truck. America was not even selling corndogs.What Was America?: Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era is a heavily researched academic art history book, peer-reviewed and professionally produced by the staff of Yale University Press. Its conception thus necessarily predates the