American History

From Beginning to End

Jill Lepore

Fall 2018

2018

Anti-Trump rally

2016

Tea Party rally

2009

Obama rally

2008

Anti-Obama rally

2008

2010

Tea Party rally, Washington, DC

Fourteenth Century

Aztec Codex

1607

Powhatan’s mantle

1472

T-O map, originally drawn in the 7th century

1507

Martin Waldsemuller, map of the world

1507

Martin Waldsemuller, map of the world, detail

1600

Vespucci Awakens a Sleeping America

1588

Elizabeth I, the Armada Portrait

1754

Benjamin Franklin, woodcut

1774

“America Swallowing the Bitter Draught” (the rape of taxation)

1787

Preamble to the Constitution of the United States

1792

Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1804

Political cartoon depicting Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

War News from Mexico, Richard Caton Woodville,

War with Mexico1848

1856

A political map dividing the nation into free and slave states

1864

Sojourner Truth

1882

“The Anti-Chinese Wall: The American Wall Goes Up as the Chinese Wall Goes down”

1885

Stereoscopic View of the Statue of Liberty, New York

New York Public Library

Late 19th century

Suffrage quilt, made in New York. Boston Museum of Fine Arts

1891

Populism as a patch

1910

America as a plutocracy

1912

Lou Rogers, “Tearing off the Bonds,” Judge magazine

Henry Ford Motor Plant, Michigan

1913

1921

Anti-immigration cartoon

1941

America as a superhero

1941

Jacob Lawrence, Migration series

1942

FDR with a globe

Library of Congress

1943

Office of War Information

1944

Early general-purpose digital computing

1952

CBS News using a UNIVAC to predict the election

1957

The reaction to Sputnik

1961

Jasper Johns, Map

1970

Anti-Vietnam War silk screen, California

c. 1971

Bumper sticker

Smithsonian Museum of American History

1972

Taken from Apollo 17

1976

Arcola Pettway, Lazy Gals (Bicentennial)

Boykin, Alabama

1968-2000

2000

America, connected

Nam June Paik, The Electronic Superhighway

Smithsonian Museum of American Art

2006

2010

Tea Party Rally, Washington, DC

2016

Protests at the Republican National Convention, Cleveland

2016

Election Night

Glenn Ligon, Double America 2, 2014