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1200-1870: learning resources

America before Columbus, a Mississippian view of the cosmos

Gorget, c. 1250-1350, probably Middle Mississippian Tradition, whelk shell, 10 x 2 cm (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution)
Gorget, c. 1250-1350, probably Middle Mississippian Tradition, whelk shell, 10 x 2 cm (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution)

Key points

  • In the centuries before European contact, Native Americans built networks of cities that shared technologies, belief systems, and cultural forms.
  • This Mississippian gorget, made from a shell found in the Gulf of Mexico, but discovered in a burial mound in Tennessee, demonstrates the extensive exchange between native peoples in different geographic regions before European contact.
  • Mississippian Society, which flourished between 800 and 1500 C.E. in Eastern North America, was united by the widespread production of corn, shared ideologies, and towns that often featured platform mounds.
  • The representation of Morning Star reflects a shared cosmology where the Earth is situated between an underworld and a sky world, and this is reinforced by the shell’s circular shape and incised circles that may suggest a cycle of life, death, and regeneration.

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More to think about

This gorget was found in a burial mound, marking the owner as possibly an important founder of Castalian Springs. Why do you think this particular object might have been included in his burial?

Fashioning diplomacy, the Anishinaabe, Britain, and 18th-century America

Anishinaabe outfit, c. 1790, collected by Lieutenant Andrew Foster, Fort Michilimackinac (British), Michigan, Birchbark, cotton, linen, wool, feathers, silk, silver brooches, porcupine quills, horsehair, hide, sinew; the moccasins were like made by the Huron–Wendat people (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution)
Anishinaabe outfit, c. 1790, collected by Lieutenant Andrew Foster, Fort Michilimackinac (British), Michigan, Birchbark, cotton, linen, wool, feathers, silk, silver brooches, porcupine quills, horsehair, hide, sinew; the moccasins were like made by the Huron–Wendat people (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution)

Key points

  • This
    outfit highlights the alliance between native cultures of the Great Lakes region and the British, who wanted to preserve their lucrative trade routes in the area during the years following the American Revolutionary War.
  • Anishinaabe women artisans transformed materials available through the trade networks of the British Empire to create finely-crafted clothing reflecting native traditions and aesthetic preferences.
  • Border disputes contesting the United States’ claim to northern territories near the Great Lakes and Canada contributed to political tensions that led to the War of 1812.
  • Ritual trade with native peoples involved the practice of gift-giving, exchanging objects of cultural value that demonstrated mutual respect between trade partners.
"Despite the unequal power between themselves and the colonists, indigenous North American societies were able, over time, to adapt to the new presence in their land, finding some convergences between their artistic practices and those of the Europeans. The term used to define this form of cultural encounter is syncretism—the melding of two or more different belief systems, artistic styles, or cultural practices to form a third, distinctly different one.
Although many indigenous societies had been dislocated from their ancestral homelands as a result of white settlement, epidemic, forced relocation, intertribal raiding, warfare, and shifting ethnic alliances, they were nevertheless often able to devise a culture of the middle ground. The crucial factor permitting this was that Natives and Europeans met in partnerships from which each benefited, based on trade. Natives retained aspects of their cultural autonomy as they hunted and trapped America’s abundant wildlife to supply an international market. The pelts and hides were sent to Europe; in exchange, cloth, iron and silver, and glass beads made their way across the ocean to North America. The indigenous artistic repertoire expanded to incorporate these trade goods. Although their cultures were changing so rapidly as to be threatened with virtual extinction, Native people acquired and assimilated new materials and motifs, while trying to exploit new opportunities for economic and artistic enrichment. The visual culture of the middle ground was hybrid and inventive, resilient in the face of foreign occupation."
-From Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Washington University Libraries, 2018), p. 32. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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More to think about

We often use clothes and fashion to express our identity to others. How does this Anishinaabe outfit complicate the notion of a singular American or national identity in the early years of the United States?

Wilderness, settlement, and American identity

Thomas Cole, The Hunter’s Return, 1845, oil on canvas (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)
Thomas Cole, The Hunter’s Return, 1845, oil on canvas (Amon Carter Museum of American Art).

Key points

  • propelled westward expansion in the U.S. in the 19th century. Increased settlement and industry transformed the landscape of the American frontier.
  • Cole sought to represent the
    grandeur of the American landscape. The painting represents his conflicted feelings over the inevitable loss of wilderness that accompanied economic development.
  • Cole was one of the first environmentalists. He shared the notion, popular in the early 19th century, that God’s divine presence was embodied in nature, and saw the American wilderness as central to the nation’s identity.
  • Cole is credited as the founder of the
    , which is often described as the first style of painting to be considered American.
“The seemingly untouched quality of the nation’s wilderness distinguished the United States from Europe. The landscape came increasingly to embody what Americans most valued in themselves: an “unstoried” past, and “Adamic” freedom, an openness to the future, a fresh lease on life. In time, Americans came to think of themselves as “nature’s nation.” And yet one of the paradoxes of American history…lay in the unresolved tension between the subduing of the wilderness and the honoring of it. The tension is still alive with us today, in the competing voices of environmentalists and advocates of development.”
— Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Washington University Libraries, 2018), p. 24 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

An unresolved tension

For much of the nineteenth century, America’s landscape was intimately connected with the nation’s identity (unlike Europe, nature in North America was seen as untouched by the hand of man). But the United States has also always prided itself on its entrepreneurial spirit, its economic progress, and its industry. This tension between the nation’s natural beauty and the inevitable expansion of industry was clearly felt in the mid-nineteenth century as logging, mining, railroads, and factories were quickly diminishing what once seemed an endless wilderness. Thomas Cole (1801-48) beautifully expressed the tension between these two American ideals in many of his landscape paintings.
Thomas Jefferson had envisioned that American democracy would be sustained by a nation of yeoman farmers who worked small farms with their families—such as the household pictured by Cole. By the end of 19th century, however, manufacturing had became a primary driver of the American economy.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 linked midwestern farms with cities on the east coast. Tanneries (where animal hides were processed to make leather using tannin, which was derived from hemlock trees) proliferated and lumber merchants deforested the landscape. As many as 70 million eastern hemlock trees were cut down to provide tannin. Beginning in the 1830s, the railroad had begun to cut across the American landscape, allowing for easier transportation of goods and passengers.
As the east coast grew increasingly populous and developed, more people moved westward in search of economic opportunity. The Homestead Acts were a series of laws enacted in 1862 to provide 160-acre lots of land at low cost, to encourage settlers to move west, answering Manifest Destiny’s [popup] call for westward expansion (the term was coined in 1845, the year this painting was made). Importantly, the popular conception of the west as unspoiled territory ignored the many nations of American Indians who had already settled the North American continent.

Cole’s painting

Though Cole’s The Hunter’s Return features human figures, it was seen as a landscape painting, since nature is dominant. In the art academies of Europe landscapes were not accorded the same respect as history paintings (whose subjects came from history, the bible or mythology, and therefore had clear moral elements and treated noble subjects), but Cole was intent on elevating his landscapes by imbuing them with a more serious message.
At first glance, a viewer might assume that this painting is set in the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson River Valley in New York State where Cole lived and painted, but in fact this painting is a composite of many scenes, and promotes a specific point of view—one that is ambivalent about the ways that Americans were rapidly transforming the natural beauty that was so fundamental to the nation’s understanding of itself. The foreground of the painting juxtaposes the tree stumps left by man’s axe against the more pristine wilderness seen in the middle and background of the painting.
Cole’s image then is not real, but nostalgic. The artist gave voice to the longing for a pristine, pre-industrial America. Cole wrote,
“I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away. The ravages of the axe are daily increasing. The most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. This is a regret rather than a complaint. Such is the road society has to travel.” —Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” The American Monthly Magazine, vol. 7, January 1836, p. 12.

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More to think about
Compare Cole’s The Hunter’s Return with John Gast’s American Progress. Discuss how these works suggest different perspectives on westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

Before the Civil War, the Mexican-American War as prelude

Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848, oil on canvas, 68.6 × 63.5 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)
Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848, oil on canvas, 68.6 × 63.5 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)

Key points

  • Anglo-American belief in
    served to justify the U.S. government’s efforts to claim new territories.
  • The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, resulted in the Mexican Cession of what is now the southwestern United States, including parts of what are now Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, California, Wyoming and Colorado.
  • The conflict in the 1840s over whether new territories should enter the U.S. as free or slave states foreshadowed the national division over slavery that led to the Civil War.
  • New technologies such as the newspaper and telegraph speeded communication, connected the growing nation, and helped shape the public’s response about current events. Woodville’s politically ambiguous image had broad popular appeal.

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More to think about

If the scene depicted in War News from Mexico represented life today, how would you populate the image? Who would be on the porch? The steps? Inside the house? On the periphery?

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Mount Jefferson, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Mount Jefferson, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains, 1857, oil on canvas, 80.01 x 125.73 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Jasper Francis Cropsey, Mount Jefferson, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains, 1857, oil on canvas, 80.01 x 125.73 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Key points

  • Jasper Francis Cropsey painted this autumnal scene of the White Mountains of New Hampshire at a time when the United States’ identity and future were being fiercely debated. In the years just prior to the American Civil War, issues such as westward expansion and the legality of slavery strongly divided voters.
  • The landscape of the United States was deeply entwined with these issues, both as a symbol for the nation’s unique identity–as distinct from Europe–and as a specific topic of debate. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the United States as an agrarian republic, supported largely by small farms and industries that drew on the nation’s rich and varied natural resources, was being tested in the wake of mid-19th century tensions around the addition of new territories and states as the boundaries of the country moved further west. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 book, Nature, also had a strong influence on the ways artists, writers, clergy, politicians, and others who helped to shape popular opinion thought about the role of a rural way of life, and of nature itself, in defining national identity.
  • In his painting, Cropsey cleverly used the symbolism of the landscape to convey a sense of hope for the republic in the face of the tensions of the time. The contrast of the brilliantly colored autumn leaves and the blasted tree in the foreground with the lush, summer greenery carpeting Mount Washington reminded viewers that the nation had entered a new season, metaphorically, and that challenges lay ahead. The lumber mill positioned in a timber-filled landscape, however, symbolizes the promise of the burgeoning nation to literally construct a thriving republic in this land of abundance.

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Learn more about Jasper Francis Cropsey from the National Gallery of Art.
Compare Cropsey’s symbolic use of landscape to convey his hopes for the American republic in 1857 with that of Frederick Edwin Church from 1852.
Consider Cropsey’s painting alongside other artworks that reflect the imagining of the West, territorial expansion, and the politics of slavery in the years leading up to the United States Civil War.
Learn more about White Mountains history and culture from the U.S. Forest Service.

More to think about

To our modern eyes, the degree of symbolism embedded in 19th century landscape painting might seem far-fetched. Cropsey’s painting may simply read to us as a beautiful fall scene, richly observed and recorded. However, today we too associate the values and ideals of our personal, cultural, and national identities with elements of the natural world. What are some of these modern associations and how do they contrast with those in Cropsey’s painting?

Representing freedom during the Civil War

John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, 1863, bronze (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas)
John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, 1863, bronze (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Key points

  • Lincoln’s
    in January 1863 made clear the Union’s intention to abolish slavery. However, it only freed slaves in states still in open rebellion against the Union. Slavery was not formally abolished in the United States until 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified.
  • The Freedman directly responds to the Emancipation Proclamation and may reflect Ward’s frustration at the slow progress of slavery’s abolition. The figure appears to have broken off one manacle, but the other still binds him, reinforcing the notion that he is not yet completely free.
  • Ward’s sculpture depicts an African-American man in charge of his own freedom. This depiction departs from typical Abolitionist-era images that typically showed slaves pleading for sympathy. Ward elevates his subject by building on the ideal of heroic male nudity in Greek art, but he also includes realistic details that suggest the man’s age, experience, and character.
  • In this version of the sculpture, Ward inscribes the dangling manacle with a reference to the Massachusetts 54th, the first African-American regiment in the Union Army. This reference underscores African-Americans’ willingness to fight, and die, for their freedom.
"Ward’s Freedman imagines the agent of emancipation to be the man himself. The Freedman eliminates the figure of Lincoln, focusing instead on the powerfully modeled slave. Entirely nude except for drapery across his loins, he still wears one manacle on his left wrist. His torso twists to the right, where his arm anchors the torque of his body in a pose that conveys coiled strength. His seated posture implies a further ambiguity—is he resting his weight upon the tree trunk that props his body up, or is he preparing to stand? The tension of his pose suggests an open-ended future no longer dictated by external forces but by the internal poise and dynamic power of the man himself.
The Freedman speaks a sculptural language that originates in antiquity. The classical canon of proportion, the athleticism of idealized male form, and the graceful torsion of head and body, are all apparent in Ward’s freedman. Unusually for this period, Ward uses a heroic model from antiquity—the Hellenistic Belvedere Torso, which linked physical perfection with moral grandeur—to represent a racial type that had been ordinarily associated with grotesque exaggeration and ungainly proportions. Conveying physical power and individualized features, Ward’s Freedman holds the promise of fuller human endowments and responsibilities.
The Freedman reflects the uncertainties of the future. This black American frees himself through his own efforts. Yet he cannot act alone. A decade of federally enforced efforts to establish a new order of equality collapsed in 1877, foreclosing for the time being the unrealized promise of racial justice."
—From Angela L. Miller, Janet Catherine Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Washington University Libraries, 2018), p. 284. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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More to think about

Think about other types of images that ask for our sympathy for political or social causes today. How do these images portray their subjects? Are they depicted in positions or power or passivity? What effects do these depictions have on us as viewers?

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