Was America ever great? In recent years, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the current state of the US, coupled with a desire to return the country to earlier ways of thinking and functioning. With the outbreak of COVID plunging society into confusion, for many there is an even stronger desire for the age of classic Americana, when the country was sleek and unbroken. Was it really though? I am very skeptical of the idea of a “good” age of America. The focus of this latest photography project is to examine the veneer that coats traditional views of American culture, and find its cracks where a grimmer view of the “glory days” is revealed. My window to the past is a stack of women’s home magazines from the 1940s, aggressive in their advertising of both American products and lifestyles. The messages presented in the words and images of these magazines are unrelentingly optimistic and patriotic, shining examples of the “good old” days. At the same time though, rigidly flawed social mores are also fully on display, and when spent enough time with, the frenetic messages begin to take on a more uneasy and uncertain tone, not dissimilar from the uncertainty that grips the 2020 US. If the American values of today are a crumbling shell, the subject of my work is the same shell with younger, thinner cracks, but the same truths underneath as always.