Thomas Hart Benton was an American Regionalist artist famous for his striking murals, including his provocative wall painting located in the Missouri State Capital building’s House Lounge room entitled A Social History of the State of Missouri. Benton finished this mural in the year of 1936, many people, including citizens and legislators alike
What I see when I look at this large piece of work is the different painted scenes telling the accounts of Missouri’s history and along with a few images depicting popular folklore of the state above each door leading into the lounge. Benton brilliantly divided the mural into three different intervals along each wall, each representing a distinct time period between the years of 1730 to 1930s. Each wall’s composition was made up with another five separate paintings, giving the mural a grand total of fifteen different stories being told. I have chosen to speak mainly on the North wall, because I feel its story is the strongest, especially since it highlights some of the lowest and highest points in the state’s history.
On the Northern wall, its entirety is devoted to the state’s establishment, on its left side a group of European settlers amid trade with some Native Americans is being depicted; one man is seen sluggishly leaning against the lounge’s doorframe with a jug of whiskey curled under his fingers while being shown a wooden chest filled animal pelts by a young, mohawked Indian man; in behind them there are various men loading either their mules or covered wagons with trade items, repairing broken wagon wheels or shooting off their muskets in good sport.
Then above each door Benton felt that popular folklore was a great contribute to the state’s history, so he chose three different ...
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... much energy, like you feel the pride seeping from the walls; you get a sense of humility. Benton does not focus on the dim and arrogant side of how Missouri came to be, even though he does add a bit of there, like with the selling of slaves and the persecuting of the Mormons, he wanted everyone to understand that Missouri was a place that built its way up from the bottom by the hands of its hardworking people.
Works Cited:
Whyman, Marilyn. Looking and Writing: A Guide for Art History Students. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2003. Textbook
Delahunt, M. (2011, March 14). Artlex: Art dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.artlex.com/
The Art Story Foundation. (2013). Thomas Hart Benton. Retrieved from http://www.theartstory.org/artist-benton-thomas-hart.htm
ArtNet. (2013). Thomas Hart Benton. Retrieved from http://www.artnet.com/artists/thomas hart- benton/
"Delta Arts Center | The Biggers Mural Project by John Biggers." Delta Arts Center. Winston
Professor Thomas Slaughter has provided a most thorough overview of the Whiskey Rebellion, which he asserts had by the time this book was conceived nearly two centuries after the episode transpired, had become a largely forgotten chapter of our nation's history since the time of the Civil War. He cites as direct evidence of this fact the almost complete absence of any mention of the event in many contemporary textbooks of the conservative era of the 1980's, which this reviewer can attest to as well, having been a high school student in the late 1970's, who never heard of the Whiskey Rebellion until years later. Building off of his own dissertation on the topic, the author convincingly shows that the Whiskey Rebellion was in fact an event of tremendous importance for the future of the fledgling United States of America, which was spawned by the head-long collision of a variety of far-reaching forces and factors in the still quite primitive environs of western Pennsylvania that summer and fall. Slaughter contends that one must place the frontier at the center of the great political debates of the era and fully explore the ideological, social, political, and personal contexts surrounding the episode in order to fully understand the importance of its place in American history. In doing so the author has produced a very readable work that may be enjoyed by casual readers, who will likely find the individual vignettes which open each chapter particularly fascinating, and a highly useful basis of further research by future scholars into the importance of the frontier region as it relates to events on a national scale in those early days of the republic.
Grant Wood was a Regionalist artist who continually endeavored to capture the idyllic beauty of America’s farmlands. In 1930 he had been roaming through his hometown in Iowa searching for inspiration when he stumbled upon a house that left him spellbound. From this encounter came America’s iconic American Gothic. Not long after Wood’s masterpiece was complete the once ideal countryside and the people who tended to it were overcome by despair and suffering as the Great Depression came to be. It was a time of economic distress that affected nearly every nation. America’s stock market crashed in 1929 and by 1933 millions of Americans were found without work and consequently without adequate food, shelter, and other necessities. In 1935, things took a turn for the worst as severe winds and dust storms destroyed the southern Great Plains in the event that became known as the Dust Bowl. Farmers, who had been able to fall back on their crops during past depressions, were hit especially hard. With no work or way or other source of income, many farms were foreclosed, leaving countless families hungry and homeless. Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born man who had a deep passion for social injustice, captures the well-known hopelessness of the Great Depression through his photograph Rural Rehabilitation Client. Shahn and Wood use their art to depict the desperation of everyday farmers in America due to the terrors and adverse repercussions that the Great Depression incited.
The Missouri Compromise went into motion when Missouri had a very well set population and applied for Statehood. When this began it started a battle in congress on the topic of slavery and its legality. The resolution of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was that it established clear slave states, free states, states that are closed to slavery and also states open to slavery. It brought about restrictions on slavery by limiting future slave states to below the 36°30’ line. Missouri also established the Missouri act of 1820 having no restrictions on slavery and escaped slaves are allowed to be hunted in every state and northern free states. AS to describing it as the final answer to slaver for the US it was not. It was a minor stepping stone
Examining the formal qualities of Homer Watson’s painting Horse and Rider In A Landscape was quite interesting. I chose to analyze this piece as apposed to the others because it was the piece I liked the least, therefore making me analyze it more closely and discover other aspects of the work, besides aesthetics.
..., 1820-1865. Columbia Studies in American Culture Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942): 13-14.
Sutton, Bettye. "1930-1939." American Cultural History. Lone Star College-Kingwood Library, 1999. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.
Joseph Taylor, “The Rise and Decline of a Utopian Community, Boley, Oklahoma,” Negro History Bulletin 3 (March 1940), 92; and Joseph Taylor, “Mound Bayou – Past and Present,” Negro History Bulletin 3 (April 1940), 105.
"American Cultural History." American Cultural History. Lone Star College, June 2012. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
In a passage from his book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, author John M. Barry makes an attempt use different rhetorical techniques to transmit his purpose. While to most, the Mississippi River is only some brown water in the middle of the state of Mississippi, to author John M. Barry, the lower Mississippi is an extremely complex and turbulent river. John M. Barry builds his ethos, uses elevated diction, several forms of figurative language, and different styles of syntax and sentence structure to communicate his fascination with the Mississippi River to a possible audience of students, teachers, and scientists.
The skeletal facts of his personal struggle for light and of his rise from the coalmines of West Virginia to the summit of academic achievement are great in and of them and can be briefly stated.
Andrist, Ralph K., and Edmund O. Stillman. The American Heritage History of the 1920s & 1930s. New York: American Heritage/Bonanza, 1987. Print.
The article discusses the need for these early Chicago saloons as a neighborhood commune for those men who labor long hours only to come home to poverty and despair of a desolate household. Melendy focuses on the mental, physiological, and moral nature of these workingmen. He points out that this saloon culture allows it’s patrons to develop these traits by interacting with their peers—others facing the same despair. These establishments are described as the “workingman’s school. He is both scholar and teacher” (Melendy pg. 78). Patrons gather at the bar, around tables and in the next room amongst games of pool, cards, and darts to discuss political and social problems, sporting news, and other neighborhood gossip. Here men, native and immigrant, exchange opinions and views of patriotism, brotherhood, and lessons in civil government. Melendy describes this atmosphere as cosmopolitan, and articulates that these businesses advertise this issue in their names. For example one of the downtown saloons was entitled “Everybody’s Exchange.” The saloon’s customers experienced a buffet of nationalities upon which was not so for those of poverty in previous decades. Saloons also served as disguises of corruption as Melendy illustrates by declaring “...
Kentucky was a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, where two warring families fought each other to the death during the early 19th century. Harlan wasn’t the only town in the Appalachian Mountains that grew restless, but several others as well were erupting in bloodshed. The explanation for this behavior is tied back to something called “the culture of honor”. It was in their culture, that if a person kills one person from the family, the member of this family must kill the killer of their family member. Their culture legacy affects them negatively, and they are retaliating up to now, and killing each other. All this bad situation is the cause of their negative cultural legacies. Imagine how tough culture, it was, that a mother told for his injured son “go fight and die like a man like your brother did”. They were able to change their negative culture in a positive one, to have a save society, but they didn’t do that, and That’s how lots of people lost and losing their life cause of a negative culture in Harlan
Thomas Cole was born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton, Lancashire, England. Due to financial problems his family endured, Cole, at the ripe old age of just fourteen, had to find work to assist with the family needs. He entered the work force as a textile printer and wood engraver in Philadelphia. In 1819, Cole returned to Ohio where his parents resided. Here, a portrait painter by the name of Stein, would become Cole’s primary teaching vehicle and inspiration for his oil techniques we’ve come to be familiar with. During this time, Cole was extremely impressed by what he saw in the landscapes of the New World and how different they were from the small town of England from whence he hailed. Self taught, art came naturally to Cole.