Interpreting the Visual Tape

Imagining the Revolution is a serial of  lessons that challenge students to consider works of fine art depicting events of the American Revolution as primary sources—not for the events they depict, but for agreement how artists and their audiences have thought about those events. The goal of the serial is to enrich understanding of the American Revolution and its of import role in American culture, while teaching students to interpret visual images equally historical evidence.

The lessons in the serial ask students to set aside the most common question asked about any work of art depicting an historical upshot: Is information technology accurate? They challenge students to enquire more sophisticated questions: Why did the creative person depict the event every bit he did? What does the piece of work of art advise the artist and his generation thought about the outcome and the people involved in information technology?

Imagining the Revolution leads students to consider visual arts in the aforementioned style we ask them to consider letters, speeches and other documents. When students read Martin Luther King'due south Alphabetic character from Birmingham Jail, their first question should not be whether King was right. Their outset question should be about why Rex wrote what he wrote, and what he hoped to achieve. When they consider works of fine art as historical artifacts, students should ask what the artist was trying to convey and why.

Each lesson in Imagining the Revolution is based on a work of art. Some present more than than one, often inviting comparing between images and request students to consider how and why the images differ. Some of the lessons focus on images created in the revolutionary era. Others focus on images created long later the American Revolution, simply which reverberate the key importance of the American Revolution in American culture.

A central premise of Imagining the Revolution is that the American Revolution created our national identity. That identity was shaped and defined past visual images of the Revolution. Some of those images, similar John Trumbull's depiction of the Battle of Bunker Hill and Emanuel Leutze'south Washington Crossing the Delaware, have been reproduced hundreds and even thousands of times, and are fundamental parts of our shared national culture.

The aim of Imagining the Revolution is to teach students how to translate the visual record of the American Revolution, which consists of visual arts—paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. The American Revolution took identify earlier photography made it possible to create literal depictions of people and events. The visual record of the American Revolution consists of images filtered by the imagination of their creators, and normally created to shape the impressions of viewers about people and events. Imagining the Revolution asks students to go beyond the obvious questions well-nigh the literal accuracy of images to explore the intent of the artists and the meaning they and their contemporaries attached to the people and events they depicted. Today's students are bombarded with images, and the power to interpret them properly is a skill of ever increasing importance.

This detail from Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre is featured in an Imagining the Revolution lesson.

Imagining the Boston Massacre

This lesson invites students to examine and translate depictions of the fatal confrontation between Bostonians and British soldiers on the dark of March 5, 1770, including engravings published within weeks of the tragedy. The lesson challenges students to prepare aside preconceptions most the images, examine them in detail, and attain interpretive conclusions virtually how the images reflect what the artists and their audiences thought about the event.

Imagining the Boston Massacre

An 1830 engraving of the Battle of Lexington provides students with an opportunity to contrast views of the battle in this Imagining the Revolution lesson.

Imagining the Boxing of Lexington

This lesson invites students to consider four different published images of the Battle of Lexington, created over 123 years beginning with ane created in the summertime of 1775. In the commencement image, Lexington militiamen are presented as victims, but in each of the succeeding images they are depicted returning British fire with increasing determination. The lesson asks students to consider why the depictions changed over time.

Imagining Lexington

This detail of a mid-nineteenth-century lithograph of the Battle of Bunker Hill, after John Trumbull's painting, gives students an opportunity to interpret views of the battle.

Imagining the Boxing of Bunker Hill

This lesson invites students to consider two contemporary images of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first created in the summer of 1775 equally a response to popular interest in the battle, and the second the familiar John Trumbull painting executed soon after the war.  The lessons asks students to compare the two and suggest why the artists chose to emphasize dissimilar aspects of the battle.

Imagining Bunker Hill

This detail of John Trumbull's Death of Mercer at the Battle of Princeton is part of the lesson Imagining the Battle of Princeton.

Imagining the Battle of Princeton

This lesson asks students to analyze and compare two very dissimilar depictions of the Boxing of Princeton created past contemporaries. The first image is James Peale's painting, The Battle of Princeton. Peale's Princeton is uniquely of import, because it is the simply painting of a Revolutionary War battle painted by a participant. The second is John Trumbull's The Decease of General Mercer at the Boxing of Princeton, January 3, 1777.

Imagining Princeton

This mezzotint engraving by Charles Willson Peale was the first authentic published likeness of George Washington.

Imagining George Washington

This lesson asks students to examine three gimmicky images of George Washington and consider what the artist was seeking to convey well-nigh Washington in each. The aim of the lesson is to railroad train students to look for symbolic elements in otherwise familiar images.

Imagining Washington

Francis Marion is wrapped in a cloak while crossing a South Carolina river in this nineteenth-century painting.

Imagining the Swamp Fox

Francis Marion, the "Swamp Trick" of Southward Carolina, became 1 of the most important heroes of the Revolutionary State of war in the early on nineteenth century, thanks largely to popular books, poems, and paintings that were published equally prints sold all over the country. This lesson asks students to consider how images are shaped by popular literature and in turn shape the manner Americans recall near their past.

Imagining the Swamp Play a joke on

British General Charles O'Hara surrenders the British army to American General Benjamin Lincoln in John trumbull's depiction of the victory at Yorktown.

Imagining the Siege of Yorktown

The Siege of Yorktown and the subsequent give up of the British army nether Lord Cornwallis was the climactic victory of the Revolutionary State of war on the Northward American mainland.  This lesson asks students to consider ii bang-up depictions of the event—John Trumbull's heroic painting of the surrender displayed in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, and August Couder'southward as heroic painting of the siege displayed in the Hall of Battles in the Palace of Versailles in French republic—and analyze why the artists chose to draw the event as they did.

Coming Before long!

Imagining the Abolition of Slavery

In 1792, Samuel Jennings, a native of Philadelphia living in England, painted an apologue symbolizing the abolitionism of slavery for the reading room of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the oldest private library in the United States and a eye of antislavery thought and activity. This lesson challenges students to translate the rich symbolism in the painting to reveal what the painting meant to the directors of the Library Company who instructed Jennings, and more broadly nigh how they imagined slavery should be concluded.

Imagining Abolition