Culture, faith and the arts
馃帹 Art, Music and Writing from the Revolution to the Civil War
The paintings, songs, hymns, pamphlets, poems and novels Americans made between 1765 and 1865: Revere, Trumbull and Stuart, Yankee Doodle and Billings, Common Sense and Wheatley, the Hudson River School, Emerson and Whitman, spirituals and parlor songs, abolition in print, and the Civil War in photographs and anthems.
- 1Art of the RevolutionPaul Revere's copied massacre print, Copley's portrait of a silversmith in shirtsleeves, West's dying general in a red coat, and Trumbull's Revolution on canvas: how American artists of the 1760s to the 1820s made pictures that argued, and pictures that remembered.24 min
- 2Songs of the RevolutionHow a British joke tune became the rebels' own, how John Dickinson wrote a song to make a tax argument stick, and how a one-eyed Boston tanner named William Billings gave the war its hymn: the music Americans sang, marched to and fought over from 1767 to 1785.24 min
- 3Writings of the RevolutionA newspaper printed as a tombstone, a farmer who was really a lawyer, a pamphlet whose sales figures were mostly its author's boast, an enslaved poet whose genius Jefferson refused to see, a playwright who became the Revolution's historian, and a Declaration written to sound like the American mind: the print culture that argued the colonies into independence.26 min
- 4Arts of the Early RepublicFrom Gilbert Stuart's unfinished Washington to Francis Scott Key's poem on a night of bombs: how the new United States gave itself a face, a museum, public buildings, songs and even its own spelling between 1783 and 1831.26 min
- 5Painters of the American WildernessThomas Cole taught Americans to see their wild country as a gift and a warning, his friends and students carried the idea from the Catskills to Niagara, the Andes and the Rockies, and George Caleb Bingham turned the same careful eye on a Missouri election day.25 min
- 6Literature of the Young NationFrom Rip Van Winkle's bewildered return in 1819 to Emily Dickinson's locked drawer of poems: how American writers between the War of 1812 and the Civil War built a national literature, and what they said about liberty, conscience and the single person standing against the crowd.24 min
- 7Music of the PeopleWhat ordinary Americans sang between 1800 and 1860: shape-note hymns in the hollow square, camp meeting choruses, the spirituals of the enslaved, the songs of Stephen Foster, the blackface minstrel show that was both the most popular stage entertainment of its day and a racist one, brass bands, and the parlor piano that put sheet music in middle-class homes.24 min
- 8Slavery, Abolition and the ArtsHow a pottery medallion, a ship diagram, three slave narratives, a best-selling novel, protest poems and songs, and one photograph of a scarred back changed what free people could see and feel about slavery, and how the defenders of slavery answered in print.26 min
- 9The Civil War in Art, Music and WordsThe songs both armies marched to, the first photographs of American dead, Winslow Homer's drawings from the camps and his great painting of 1866, Lincoln's two finest speeches read as literature, and Walt Whitman's war poems from the hospital wards.26 min
- 10The Star-Spangled BannerA Georgetown lawyer watched a fort in the rain, and a poem came out of it. This lesson tells the night of September 13, 1814, the flag and the woman who sewed it, the tune, all four stanzas, the third stanza's slavery debate, and the road to the 1931 anthem law.15 min
- 11Battle Hymn of the RepublicJulia Ward Howe woke before dawn in a Washington hotel in November 1861 and wrote words for a soldiers' song. This lesson follows the tune from camp meetings to John Brown's Body, prints the 1862 Atlantic Monthly text, traces the Bible passages under it, and tells how Lincoln, a singing chaplain and later generations used it.15 min
- 12Confederate Songs: Dixie and the Bonnie Blue FlagA minstrel walk-around written in New York became a Confederate favorite, and Abraham Lincoln asked a band to play it after Appomattox. This lesson tells the origins of Dixie, The Bonnie Blue Flag, The Southern Marseillaise and Maryland, My Maryland, shows how each side borrowed tunes, and records how the songs are treated today.15 min