Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

How can I give my students a sense of the frontier when we're surrounded by suburbia? Join Michael Farris as he discusses using art to open new vistas on today's Home School Heartbeat.

Michael Farris:
Here in Loudoun County, Virginia, where I live, it's still possible to drive down dirt roads and see picturesque landscapes with stone walls and livestock grazing in the fields. But for many a modern student, their daily landscape looks nothing like the land surveyed by George Washington or documented in the journals of Lewis and Clark. For some kids it's hard to envision the world before Wal-Mart.


Try taking your student back in time by including the work of 19th-century American landscape painters in your study of history. Such painters captured the vast undeveloped beauty of the fertile frontier. These paintings make it easy to understand why adventurous men sought new opportunities in the west. One group in particular, known as the Hudson River School, made landscape painting their specialty. They painted large canvases with scenes from the Hudson River Valley and other areas of the northeast. Thomas Cole led this movement to document the beauty of the American scene. You can examine Thomas Cole's 1826 painting called Pastoral Landscape with Fishermen, or Frederic Edwin Church's spectacular painting of Niagara Falls. When you study the westward expansion, look at Albert Bierstadt's Oregon Trail, painted in 1869. And consider the work of Frederic Remington who captured the spirit of the West, with his work celebrating the cowboy and the American Indian.


Open your students' eyes to historic America by adding the work of these great artists to your study of history. I'm Mike Farris.