Chapter 12: Visual Activity 1
Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way—near Council Bluffs, Iowa
This painting by Andrew Melrose depicts the mid-nineteenth-century landscape of agricultural and technological progress. [Photo credit] Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, 92.147.1.
This painting by Andrew Melrose depicts the mid-nineteenth-century landscape of agricultural and technological progress. [Photo credit] Museum of the American West, Autry National Center, 92.147.1.
Reading the Image: How does the artist use light to suggest the environment of progress? How are trees depicted in this painting?
Connections: What messages about nature and progress does the artist suggest? How does the title of the painting contribute to your understanding of these messages?
The following activity will enhance your visual analysis skills and deepen your knowledge of this period.
Visual Activity 2
Pioneer Family on the Trail West
In 1860, W. G. Chamberlain photographed these unidentified travelers momentarily at rest by the upper Arkansas River in Colorado. Traveling in family groups created additional challenges for Americans moving west. [Photo credit] Denver Public Library, Western History Division #F3226.
Visual Activity 2
Pioneer Family on the Trail West
In 1860, W. G. Chamberlain photographed these unidentified travelers momentarily at rest by the upper Arkansas River in Colorado. Traveling in family groups created additional challenges for Americans moving west. [Photo credit] Denver Public Library, Western History Division #F3226.
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Reading the Image: Based on this photograph, what were some of the difficulties faced by pioneers traveling west?
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Connections: How did wagon trains change the western United States?
Chapter 13: Visual Activity 1
The Henry Frank, New Orleans
The steamboat Henry Frank sits dangerously overloaded with cotton bales at the New Orleans levee in 1854. The magnitude of the cotton trade in the South’s largest city and major port is difficult to capture. Six years earlier, a visitor, Solon Robinson, had expressed awe: “It must be seen to be believed; and even then, it will require an active mind to comprehend acres of cotton bales standing upon the levee, while miles of drays [carts] are constantly taking it off to the cotton presses. . . . Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water.” Amid the mountains of cotton, few Southerners doubted that cotton was king. [Photo credit] Historic New Orleans Collection.
The steamboat Henry Frank sits dangerously overloaded with cotton bales at the New Orleans levee in 1854. The magnitude of the cotton trade in the South’s largest city and major port is difficult to capture. Six years earlier, a visitor, Solon Robinson, had expressed awe: “It must be seen to be believed; and even then, it will require an active mind to comprehend acres of cotton bales standing upon the levee, while miles of drays [carts] are constantly taking it off to the cotton presses. . . . Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water.” Amid the mountains of cotton, few Southerners doubted that cotton was king. [Photo credit] Historic New Orleans Collection.
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Reading the Image: How does the image of the Henry Frank demonstrate the centrality of cotton to southern agriculture and southern people?
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Connections: Where did most of the cotton on the Henry Frank likely come from?
Visual Activity 2
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Connections: Where did most of the cotton on the Henry Frank likely come from?
Visual Activity 2
The Price of Blood
This 1868 painting by T. S. Noble depicts a transaction between a slave trader and a rich planter. The trader nervously pretends to study the contract, while the planter waits impatiently for the completion of the sale. The planter’s mulatto son, who is being sold, looks away. The children of white men and slave women were property and could be sold by the father/master. [Photo credit]Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Ga.
This 1868 painting by T. S. Noble depicts a transaction between a slave trader and a rich planter. The trader nervously pretends to study the contract, while the planter waits impatiently for the completion of the sale. The planter’s mulatto son, who is being sold, looks away. The children of white men and slave women were property and could be sold by the father/master. [Photo credit]Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Ga.
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Reading the Image: Who is absent from the painting and what does this suggest about the tragedy of miscegenation?
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Connections: The white, male planter represented the pinnacle of southern society. How did white women, black men, and black women fit into this strict hierarchy?
Chapter 14: Visual Activity 1
The Modern Medea
In 1855, a slave family—Robert Garner; his twenty-two-year-old wife, Margaret; their four children; and his parents—fled Kentucky. Margaret’s owner tracked them to a cabin in Ohio. Thinking that her children would be returned to slavery, Margaret seized a butcher knife and cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter. She was turning on her other children when slave catchers burst in and captured her. Abolitionists claimed the act revealed the horror of slavery; defenders of slavery argued that the deed provide that slaves were savages. This 1867 painting shows Margaret standing over the bodies of two boys. Artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble departed from history in order to allude to the Greek myth of Medea, who killed her two children to spite her husband. [Photo credit] Harper’s Weekly, May 18, 1867/Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
In 1855, a slave family—Robert Garner; his twenty-two-year-old wife, Margaret; their four children; and his parents—fled Kentucky. Margaret’s owner tracked them to a cabin in Ohio. Thinking that her children would be returned to slavery, Margaret seized a butcher knife and cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter. She was turning on her other children when slave catchers burst in and captured her. Abolitionists claimed the act revealed the horror of slavery; defenders of slavery argued that the deed provide that slaves were savages. This 1867 painting shows Margaret standing over the bodies of two boys. Artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble departed from history in order to allude to the Greek myth of Medea, who killed her two children to spite her husband. [Photo credit] Harper’s Weekly, May 18, 1867/Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
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Reading the Image: What does the painting suggest about the white men’s response to Margaret Garner’s actions? About Garner’s relationship with her children?
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Connections: How might Northern white women have interpreted this image?
Visual Activity 2
John Brown Going to His Hanging, by Horace Pippin, 1942
The grandparents of Horace Pippin, a Pennsylvania artist, were slaves. His grandmother witnessed the hanging of John Brown, and this painting recalls the scene she so often described to him. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John Lambert Fund. [Photo credit] Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John Lambert Fund.
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Reading the Image: What was the artist trying to convey about the tone of John Brown’s execution? According to the painting, what were the feelings of those gathered to witness the event?
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Connections: How did Brown’s trial and execution contribute to the growing split between North and South?
Chapter 15: Visual Activity 1
Union Ordnance, Yorktown, VirginiaAs the North successfully harnessed its enormous industrial capacity to meet the needs of the war, cannons, mortars, and shells poured out of its factories. A fraction of that abundance is seen here at Yorktown in 1862, ready for transportation to Union troops in the field. [Photo credit] Library of Congress.
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Reading the Image: What does this image indicate about northern military might in the Civil War?
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Connections: What role did the North’s industrial power play in its victory in the war?
Visual Activity 2
The Battle of Savage’s Station, by Robert Knox Sneden, 1862
Artist Robert Sneden captured an early Confederate assault in what became known as the Seven Days Battle. Over the next three years, Sneden produced hundreds of vivid drawings and eventually thousands of pages of remembrance, providing one of the most complete accounts of a Union soldier’s Civil War experience. [Photo credit] Lora Robbins Collection of Virginia Art, Virginia Historical Society
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Reading the Image: What can we glean from this watercolor about the realities of the battlefield during the early years of the Civil War?
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Connections: What can this watercolor tell us about how the Civil War experience differed for the North and the South?
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