This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The fight was a protracted one, lasting over 70 years, and it did not result in equity for diverse women. Voting and citizenship came to women of color differently depending on region, class, race, and ethnicity. For example,…

Students today are used to a rich visual dimension of living. Students carry with them to school each day devices that allow them to capture their lives in real time. This is possible because of the hard labor of men who toiled for hours to capture for time immemorial images that have become engrained in the American narrative. When teaching the…

In 1971, the newly established Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created DOCUMERICA, a federal government photography project born out of the nation's environmental crisis. The photographers hired by the EPA took thousands of photographs depicting pollution, waste, and blight, but they were given the freedom to capture the era's…

Artists today draw on a range of sources--newspapers, magazines, photographs, film, audio, and of course the Internet--to create artworks that serve as visual "texts" of a specific place and moment in time. Using artworks as sources and understanding how to decode them in the service of "drilling down" into difficult topics can create powerful…

Presents a workbook extract from the teaching resource kit entitled "Land and Landscapes: Views of America's History and Culture" that examines landscape paintings and photographs from the 19th century to the present. Explains that the main focus of this extract is to question how European American views about landownership affected…