In judging a photograph, one distinguishes between the quality of the image and that of the object shown, and so it is with a literary anthology. American Architectural History, edited by Keith Eggener, is a compilation of essays published between 1981 and 2002 that presents a vivid and faithful image of the discipline today. What it reveals about that discipline is, of course, a different question altogether. American Architectural History was designed to free the instructor from the burdensome task of making a reading packet to supplement a survey text. One can do this with a set of well-chosen primary sources, such as Leland Roth’s long out-of-print America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). Or one can use secondary sources, showing students the methods and concerns of modern scholarship. This is the approach of Eggener, whose twenty-four “concise, lively, accessible, and engaging” texts were selected to illustrate the wide “diversity of subject matter, method, and authorial voice” that characterizes the discipline today (16). They are grouped in six chronological sections that proceed from pre-Columbian and colonial America to the present, each prefaced with brief introductory remarks and an up-to-date bibliography. In every...