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Using Paintings to Solve History's Mysteries Through Economic Thinking
- 1. Using Paintings to Solve History’s Mysteries Through Economic Thinking Deborah Kozdras, Ph.D. University of South Florida Stavros.coedu.usf.edu dkozdras@usf.edu
- 3. Historical Thinking About Art Study • historical thinking as: the ability to place a piece of artwork in a larger historical context, and to make an argument about the artwork’s place in a particular time period, just as historians do (Barton, 2001; Desai, Hamlin, & Mattson, 2010). Findings • students do not automatically comprehend the meanings and significances of primary and secondary sources within a larger historical context • sources alone do not teach students nor do they equip students to think historically http://www.socstrpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/MS_06372_Spring2013.pdf
- 4. So what?
- 6. Historical Paintings • Genre emerged in 1700s to describe paintings with subject matter from classical history and mythology, and the Bible • During the first half of 19th century history painting was one of the few ways that the British public could experience its overseas Empire. In this context, history painting became a form of documentation. http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/h/history-painting http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/interactives/art-trek/george-washington-crossing-the-delaware
- 7. American Colonies: Portraits of Elites • Portraits of the young society’s elites, colonists who descended from important European families. • Wife of the prominent Dutch settler. Her left hand, which bends in an unnatural and distorted manner, holds a delicate flower meant to accentuate the sitter’s feminine grace. • Awkwardness in portraits because they were not academically trained. • What are the economic implications?
- 8. Economic Ideology . . . This portrait of leading Philadelphia businessman and inventor Patrick Lyon is unusual for its era because of its depiction of a subject engaged in manual labor. John Neagle was only twenty-nine when he received the commission for this work. Patrick Lyon was a wealthy, successful man when he commissioned Neagle to paint him, but he asked the artist to depict him as a blacksmith, the vocation in which he had begun his career. In the early nineteenth century, people who could afford such large-scale, heroic images of themselves usually preferred to be depicted in formal dress and surrounded by expensive objects, implying their aristocratic status. In contrast, Lyon explicitly told Neagle that he did “not wish to be represented as what I am not—a gentleman.”[1] because he viewed the working class as honest and upper class as a source of injustice.
- 9. Paintings: Primary or Secondary Sources? The phrase “created at the time under study” provided a focus for their discussion and decision. The page about the item identifies this as a chromolithograph published in 1893, and Columbus is thought to have visited San Salvador in October of 1492. With those dates in mind, would this be a primary source for studying Columbus’ first encounter with land in the New World? It was created 400 years after the event, definitely not “at the time under study.” https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2011/10/what-makes-a-primary-source-a-primary-source/
- 10. Paintings: Primary or Secondary Sources? How would the answer change if the picture were being used to study late nineteenth-century attitudes about the event? Most of the institute participants agreed that this picture would be a primary source in that context. They added that it would also be a primary source for the study of nineteenth century painting. At one point, I overheard a teacher remark “This is exactly the type of conversation you want in your classroom!” https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2011/10/what-makes-a-primary-source-a-primary-source/
- 12. Manifest Destiny
- 13. A Picture Says a Thousand Words http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Winter11/painting.cfm?showSite=mobile Interactive painting http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/Winter11/painting/
- 14. Timeline of Civil War Paintings http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/civilwar_timeline/
- 15. What is wrong with this picture? http://www.civilwarinart.org/items/show/43
- 16. Paintings as Sources: Values • Can effectively capture the spirit, opinions and sentiments generally characterizing that time. • Contain evidence about a culture at specific moments in history- customs, styles, preferences, atmosphere, architecture, manner of dress, appearance. • Provide a visually stimulating piece of historical evidence. • Examples of art styles of the time. • Comment on features of regime. • Can show how people viewed a time.
- 17. Paintings as Sources: Limitations • Produced by an artist with a definite point of view, and therefore inevitably biased, being influenced by the opinions and prejudices of its creator. • Limited scope- generally highlights one specific aspect of a period of history. • Artist not generally concerned with providing a factual account of a historical event or circumstance, but rather with producing a creative piece of work or expressing own opinions and emotional reactions.
- 18. Choices, Changes, and Consequences: Investigate History’s Mysteries Using the Economic Way of Thinking Principles of Economic Thinking 1. People choose. 2. All choices involve costs and benefits. 3. People respond to incentives. 4. People create economic systems that influence choices and incentives. 5. People gain when they trade voluntarily. 6. Decisions have future consequences. Questions Based on Principles 1. What did they choose to do? 2. What were the benefits and costs of their choices? 3. What incentives existed or were introduced? 4. How did the system influence choice? How did changes influence choice? 5. How did trade work? What were the gains from trade? 6. What were the future consequences of decisions?
- 20. Florida Activity: What is Your EQ? • Use the Economic Way of Thinking to ask Economic Questions (EQ’s) about Florida based on Christopher Still’s paintings.
- 22. Art of the Holocaust
- 23. ART • Art communicates identity. • Art communicates history. • Art communicates culture. • Art communicates humanity. • Art communicates technology. • Art communicates wonder. http://nieonline.com/tbtimes/downloads/supplements/2013_mofa.pdf
- 24. Paintings Activity • What questions could you ask about the painting based on your standards? • What other questions would you ask when you consider historical thinking and critical media literacy? • What EQ’s would you ask?
Editor's Notes
- The paintings deal with family, community, patriotism, the economy’s shift from agrarian to industrial, and burning social questions of the day like environmentalism and slavery. Throughout the whole progression, painting styles evolve and blossom, becoming mature in the 19th century as painters solidified basic skills and imbued their works with a sense of American character. Por
- http://mfas3.s3.amazonaws.com/objects/SC196760.jpg
- Westward Movement Americans have always looked westward. As the coastal plains filled, colonists arriving from Europe sought unclaimed land in the backcountry of each colony. After the French and Indian War, settlers crossed the Appalachians and entered the Tennessee and Ohio River Basins. After the American Revolution, settlers began to fill the Ohio Valley and moved out into western Georgia and Alabama. The conclusion of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of America’s land holdings and brought new opportunities to move westward into the Mississippi River Valley. Florida, the last piece of foreign held territory in the east was acquired in 1819 from Spain. By 1850, Americans had settled California, Oregon and Washington. The process of settlement took 150 years to reach the Appalachians, 50 years to reach the Mississippi and another 30 years to settle the Pacific states. In 230 years, Americans had come to dominate the continent. Americans believed such rapid expansion must have been a result of divine favor referred to as Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was a phrase coined to describe the belief that America was to expand and settle the entire continent of North America. The phrase originated in 1845 when John L. O’Sullivan, a newspaper editor, wrote that it was America’s "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." The center of population growth in the years after the War of 1812 was in future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and northern Kentucky. In this region three factors encouraged families in the eastern states to move into the Midwest. First, Native Americans were removed from the region. Second, land speculators had acquired large tracts of land and were eager to sell. Third, as the national infrastructure moved westward it was easier to migrate west. Although interest rates on land were high, so were grain prices throughout the 1830’s and 1840’s. Fertile soil and the development of better plows and harvesters allowing farmers large crops yields and increasing the allure of westward expansion. use this image early on in my western history classes for several reasons. First, even students with little experience in talking about visual images find it easy to talk about what they see here. Second, students quickly grasp that although the painting does not convey a realistic representation of actual events, it nonetheless expresses a powerful historical idea about the meaning of America’s westward expansion. This sparks a discussion about the ways in which ideas—whether grounded in material fact or not—can both reflect and shape human actions. Finally, after a discussion of the larger cultural ideas embodied in this image, we move to a discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebrated 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Students quickly perceive that while Turner had a way with words, his argument was not wholly original. He distilled ideas already present in American popular thought and many of them are present in this painting, painted some two decades earlier. As students begin to describe what they see, they quickly realize that they’re looking at a kind of historical encyclopedia of transportation technologies. The simple Indian travois precedes the covered wagon and the pony express, the overland stage and the three railroad lines. The static painting thus conveys a vivid sense of the passage of time as well as of the inevitability of technological progress. The groups of human figures, read from left to right, convey much the same idea. Indians precede Euro-American prospectors, who in turn come before the farmers and settlers. The idea of progress coming from the East to the West, and the notion that the frontier would be developed by sequential waves of people (here and in Turner’s configuration, always men) was deeply rooted in American thought. Then, of course, there is that “beautiful and charming female,” as Crofutt described her, whose diaphanous gown somehow remains attached to her body without the aid of velcro or safety pins. On her head she bears what Crofutt called “the Star of Empire.” And lest viewers still not understand her role in this vision of American destiny, he explains: “In her right hand she carries a book—common school—the emblem of education and the testimonial of our national enlightenment, while with the left hand she unfolds and stretches the slender wires of the telegraph, that are to flash intelligence throughout the land.” The Indians flee from progress, unable to adjust to the shifting tides of history. The painting hints at the past, lays out a fantastic version of an evolving present, and finally lays out a vision of the future. A static picture conveys a dynamic story. The ideas embodied in this painting not only suggest the broad sources for Turner’s essay about the importance of the frontier in American life, they suggest that his essay reached an audience for whom these ideas were already familiar. Students often imagine the issues raised by visual images to be peripheral to the more central questions raised by literary sources. The Gast painting, however, allows one to demonstrate the ways in which painters, too, could engage large historical questions, cultural stereotypes and political ideas, by using a visual vocabulary that viewers found both familiar and persuasive.