This document provides images and descriptions that represent pivotal moments and developments in American culture and history. It touches on topics like European exploration and maps of North America, Native American art and the Spanish missions, key events and figures of the American Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the California Gold Rush, the rise of mail order catalogues, immigration, industrialization, the inventions of Edison, Ford, and others, the women's workforce in World War 2, the Civil Rights movement, American music, the moon landing, and the creation of the internet. The document showcases various visual representations of people, places, and inventions that helped shape and define America over centuries.

1. Twenty-two images that represent some of the main events in American culture and history

2. The Waldseemüller Map of 1507
The map displays the first use of America to designate the newly discovered
continent (label on South American region)

3. An early example of Native American basketwork from the northeastern United States
(now the state of Maine)
Yarn Basket, c.1760, Abenaki Native American Tribe

4. Founded in 1776, the Mission served as a center for Catholics and the
conversion of Native Americans, including the Ohlones and Miwoks
Mission Dolores, San Francisco, Spanish Period

5. Paul Pletka, “Nuestro señor el desollado” (2004)
that follows, the artist shows the merging of Native American and European religio

7. “Washington's Crossing the Delaware” Emmanuel Leutze, 1851
The iconic moment of decision in the American Revolutionary War

8. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (also known as Westward Ho)
by Emmanuel Leutze, 1861
Many historians regard the frontier — and its closing — as the most significant
defining event in American history

9. Durand depicts poet William Cullen Bryant and painter Thomas Cole in
a moment of spiritual communion with the grandeur of American
nature.
Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1849)

10. Nearly a quarter of a century after the event, Nahl sets forth the values — positive and negative (see the next
image) — of life on the American mining frontier during the California Gold Rush
Sunday Morning in the Mines by Charles Christian Nahl, 1872

11. Drunkenness, thievery (the two men holding the drunken miner), gambling, violence (note the raised stool and the gun being fired
under the gambler’s canopy)
Then, on the right, reading the Bible on the day of rest (mining implements laid aside), cleaning up, and writing a letter home

12. “SOME HAVE CALLED the big mail-order catalogues the first characteristically American kind of book. Just as, three centuries before, New England
schoolchildren had learned the path to salvation along with their ABCs and had learned how to read at the same time that they learned the tenets of
their community, so farm children now learned from the new Bible of their consumption community. In rural schoolhouses, children were drilled in
reading and spelling from the catalogue.They practiced arithmetic by filling out orders and adding up items. They tried their hand at drawing by
copying the catalogue models, and acquired geography by studying the postal-zone maps. In schoolrooms that had no other encyclopedia, a Ward's or
Sears catalogue handily served the purpose; it was illustrated, it told you what something was made of and what it was good for, how long it would last,
and even what it cost. Many a mother in a household with few children's books pacified her child with the pictures in the catalogue. When the new
book arrived, the pictures in the old catalogue were indelibly fixed in the memory of girls who cut them up for paper dolls. Just as Puritan children
were supposed to think of their Bible as an exhaustive catalogue of the "types" which provided the pattern for all the actual happenings of the world, so
the children of rural America thought of the big books from Sears' and Ward's as exhaustive catalogues of the material world." -- Daniel Boorstin,
Americans: the Democratic Spirit

13. From farm to university
Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell

14. The Pony Express and the Telegraph by George Ottinger
Old and new ways of uniting the spaces of America

15. Thomas Alva Edison:
The American Who Made a Business of Invention
Edison’s Patents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Edison_patents

16. Mass-produced freedom of motion for American consumers
Model T Ford

17. The glory and promise of liberty for immigrants arriving in America
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s The Statue of Liberty 1879-1886
painting by Edward Moran

18. Rosie the Riveter (on the right) by Norman Rockwell, 1943
The prophet Isiah (on the left) by Michelangelo, 1508-1512
Celebration of feminine strength, the dignity of labor, and prophesy of future power

19. The Atomic Bomb
The ultimate American weapon of war

20. American Music Pioneers and Explorers
Scott Joplin John Coltrane and Miles Davis

21. “The Problem We All Live With,” by Norman Rockwell (1964)

22. America on the Moon

23. The United States of Algorithm
Herman Hollerith’s first computer punched cards,
first for American census tabulation used in 1890
Real hand into the virtual world:
Mouse invented in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institutde
by Doug Engelbart
Map showing the relative density
of internet-connected devices in America, 2014
The First Internet:
ARPANET in 1969