Analyzing Composition in Paintings

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s site provides a nice straightforward explanation of how to analyze the composition of historical paintings. Using Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware, the site explains how artists use various elements of composition like lighting to convey particular messages about the events depicted in paintings. For lesson plans on how to interpret historical paintings check out this site.

Waters House History Center [MD]

Description

The Waters House History Center contains Montgomery County, MD census records; genealogy texts; history publications; 350,000 photographs, largely from 1968 through 1999; an architectural collection; land surveys; newspapers; and Bibles. The oldest portions of the Waters House date to the 1790s.

The resource center offers research library access.

Picturing United States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence

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Photo, The Statue of Freedom, 1857, Architect of the Capitol
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This website presents tools to help teachers incorporate visual evidence into their classrooms.

Users may want to begin with the Lessons in Looking section, which includes four essays, each authored by a scholar of art/visual culture and a historian, offering methods for analyzing visual materials and demonstrating the effectiveness of visual evidence for illuminating important themes in U.S. history. Topics include: race in Antebellum America, identity in colonial America, American identity in the Gilded Age, and African American visual culture in the mid-20th century.

The website also includes an annotated guide to the most useful visual resources available online, 13 essays by educators on their favorite image to use in the classroom; eight reviews of recent books, online exhibits, and articles that have provided new perspectives on teaching and learning about visual culture; and three archived and three ongoing forums on using visual evidence to teach colonial America, slavery, Jacksonian America, the Civil War, the American West, and the Great Depression and New Deal.

Preservation Trust of Spartanburg [SC]

Description

The Preservation Trust of Spartanburg seeks to preserve all architecture of historical import within Spartanburg, South Carolina. While the majority of the trust's programs target homeowners, educational opportunities are offered.

The trust offers guided and self-guided historic district walking tours, outreach presentations, information on historic color palates, and research assistance for historic homes and/or genealogy.

Mountain Home Historical Society and Museum

Description

The local historical society, founded in 1961, opened the Elmore County Museum in a vacated Carnegie Library building in 1977. Built in 1908, the museum building is listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Among the artifacts displayed inside are mining, agriculture, and railroad implements. The museum also focuses on the cultural heritage of the community, including Basque, Chinese, and Native American legacies.

The museum offers exhibits.

Lyndon Historical Society [VT]

Description

The Society brings together citizens interested in preserving and raising awareness of Lyndon's history. It work with public officials to ensure the preservation and accessibility of historical structures and records throughout the town and works to preserve manuscripts and artifacts from Lyndon's past.

The historical society holds special events and educational exhibits periodically, including traveling lectures and guest speakers for schoolchildren.

Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science [CA]

Description

The Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science involves the public in an active exploration of science, the arts, and local history. Permanent collections include Central Vallery Native American baskets and cradleboards and 19th-through-20th-century California landscape paints; temporary exhibits may be relevant to U.S. history studies.

The museum offers exhibits, film screenings, lectures, children's camps and workshops, tours for school groups, in-class outreach art workshops (grades 1-3), Visual Thinking Strategies outreach presentations and professional development training, and Met on the Move after-school programs.

End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center [OR]

Description

The End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center presents the history of the Oregon Trail, one of the historically most widely used routes of migration within the United States. Its period of most concentrated use was the Great Migration of 1843, also known as the Wagon Train of 1843. The site includes a visitor's center and gardens with period plants.

The center offers interpreters in period dress, hands-on activities, exhibits, cedar carving demonstrations, and a garden.