The American Gothic
US History
Exploring American Art at the Newberry
Americans and the Holocaust
John C. Calhoun and American Disunion
World War II and American Visual Culture
How did the popular media document the people and activities of the homefront and the battlefront?
The Colonization of the Black Hills in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, in Historic Maps and Documents
How can old maps help us understand the complexities of colonization in North America? What sorts of evidence do they offer? Does their distinct styling, framing, and content change how a particular landscape can be represented? Might these elements have in fact aided colonization in the Black Hills?
Flappers, G-men, and Prohibition’s Legacies
What caused Prohibition and passage of the Eighteenth Amendment?
American Indians in an Age of Empire and Revolution, 1750-1783
Indians in the Archives
What do historical images of American Indian peoples tell us about the evolving relationships between Indians and non-Indians? What valuable information about our past and ourselves can we glean from artworks that portray indigenous peoples and also the materials that artists used?
The Anti-Slavery Movement in Chicago and Illinois
What motivated the actions of abolitionists in Illinois? How did abolitionists attempt to transform public opinion on the issue of slavery? How did the abolitionist movement evolve and respond to national events that shook the nation in the 1850s?
Other Americans and the American Revolution
Who identified as “American” during the Revolution? To what extent did the American Revolution serve the interests of all inhabitants of the emerging nation?
Commodities and the Transformation of the North American Landscape
How are commodities extracted, produced, and exchanged? How have those processes shaped the physical and cultural landscape of North America? How might the way we see and study those processes alter our understanding of ourselves, the environment, or the history of North America?