The American daguerreotype represents the culmination of more than twenty years of painstaking research by Floyd and Marion Rinhart. This single volume is a historical survey of the daguerreian art that flourished between 1840 and 1860, technical details of the daguerreotype processes including color, a discussion of the impact of the earliest photography on nineteenth-century American life and art, and a biographical listing of some 2,000 daguerreotypists and other related to the art-by far the most comprehensive list of its kind ever published.