Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange (1836) Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange (1936) The Great Depression was especially hard on farmers. They not only suffered through the national economic crisis but endured a string of natural disasters, including floods and dust storms that devastated their crops and destroyed their livelihoods. Thousands of poverty-stricken families migrated to the agricultural
Cover Illustration for The Last of the Mohicans, N.C. Wyeth (1919) The Last of the Mohicans, an American adventure tale by James Fenimore Cooper, became an instant best-seller when it was published in 1826. Its popularity continued, and by 1919, when N. C. Wyeth illustrated a new, deluxe edition of the book, Cooper’s story had
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George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait), Gilbert Stuart (1796 ) Although George Washington sat for the most prominent artists of his day, Gilbert Stuart’s images of the first president and hero of the American Revolution have been so widely reproduced that it is almost impossible for Americans to conceive of Washington in any other way. Less than
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Catlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-to-toh-pa—Mandan, George Catlin (1861/1869) “There is occasionally a chief or warrior of such extraordinary renown, that he is allowed to wear horns on his head-dress.… The reader will see this custom exemplified in the portrait of Mah-to-toh-pa…. [He is] the only man in the nation who was allowed to wear
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View from Mount Holyoke (The Oxbow), Thomas Cole (1836) “The imagination can scarcely conceive Arcadian vales more lovely or more peaceful than the valley of the Connecticut,” wrote the artist Thomas Cole in his “Essay on American Scenery.” “Its villages are rural places where trees overspread every dwelling, and the fields upon its margin have
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American Flamingo, John James Audubon (1838) American Flamingo is one of the 435 hand-colored engravings that make up John James Audubon’s monumental Birds of America, issued in four volumes between 1826 and 1838. The massive publication includes life-size representations of nearly five hundred species of North American birds. Although Audubon was not the first to
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