A couple of books of Kodachrome photographs. If it wasn't Kodachrome, we wouldn't have these images.

Bound for Glory:
America in Color 1939-43
by Paul Hendrickson

The miracle of Kodachrome in 1939. These pictures are incredible. Life in America from 1939 to 1943. From Amazon:

Thanks to famous documentary photographs of Americans during the Great Depression, we tend to visualize everything that happened in the 1930s in black-and-white. In fact, Kodachrome first became available in the U.S. in 1935, and several photographers for the Farm Security Administration experimented with the new color film as they traveled across the country. Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. A sunburned family in Pie Town, New Mexico, eat a dinner of homemade biscuits, grits, and gravy. Sisters wearing print dresses all made from the same rose and blue fabric seem dazed at the wonders of a state fair in Vermont. Work horses graze on bright green grass under a moody Kansas sky. Chosen from an archive of about 1,600 vintage color slides, the 175 photos in the book are the work of several documentary photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Partway through this panorama of Americana, the tone and subject matter shift. Suddenly, the U.S. is at war, and the casual, unposed quality of the earlier images shifts into self-conscious glorification of the American war effort by the Office of War Information, with shots of steel mills and train yards, and of women newly hired by factories to assemble bomber parts. It's clear from Paul Hendrickson's engaging introduction that the pre-war images are the ones he finds most captivating. This slender volume--which aptly borrows the title of Dustbowl troubadour Woody Guthrie's autobiography--offers a window on a distant era in which grinding poverty and racial segregation coexist with the simple pleasures of rural and small-town life.

These pictures were taken by government employees and are public domain and the Library of Congress had them all online.

Bound for Glory

The above link has all the pictures in the book but they are a little light and some of the color is off. The book is better but all of the color shot for the FSA-OWI is available as high resolution scans:

America from the Great Depression to World War II

Young woman at the community laundry on Saturday afternoon, FSA ... camp, Robstown, Tex. 1942

Americans in Kodachrome 1945-1965
by Guy Stricherz

These pictures are truly amazing on all levels.

Americans in Kodachrome

Introduced in 1935 as the first modern color film, Kodachrome was used extensively after World War II by amateur photographers equipped with the new high-quality and low cost 35mm cameras. Americans in Kodachrome 1945--1965 is an unprecedented portrayal of the daily life of the people during these formative years of modern American culture. It is comprised of ninety-five exceptional color photographs made by over ninety unknown American photographers. These photographs were chosen from many thousands of slides in hundreds of collections. Like folk art in other mediums, this work is characterized by its frankness, honesty, and vigor. Made as memoirs of family and friends, the photographs reveal a free-spirited, intuitive approach, and possess a clarity and unpretentiousness characteristic of this unheralded photographic folk art. Conceived as a book and nation-wide exhibition, Americans in Kodachrome: 1945--1965 is an evocative and haunting portrait of an historic generation of Americans. - Guy Stricherz

[more]

Guy Stricherz

Girl Drinking Milk, Allentown, Pennsylvania. H. Donald Bortz, photographer, 1951