United States History Student Edition

American artists in the early 1800s began to paint true American landscapes. This painting from the 1820s by Thomas Doughty shows a scene in Pennsylvania.

Americans began to create their own styles of literature, painting, music, and architecture. During the early 1800s, American writers used settings and characters that were uniquely American. In 1828, Washington Irving wrote The Sketch Book , a collection of short stories that were often set in rural New York. One of Irving’s best-known stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” describes a local schoolteacher’s terrifying nighttime encounter with a headless horseman in the New York woods. Another New York author, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote novels such as The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer . In these novels, a folk hero frontiersman is portrayed as strong, brave, resourceful, and honorable. Painting also began to focus on American subjects. Artists such as George Catlin lived among Native Americans and painted their daily life. Thomas Doughty was a leader of the Hudson River School—artists who painted the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River. American musicians used instruments such as the banjo, which was brought by enslaved Africans and modified over time, to play American tunes from large cities to barns, tents, or log cabins. Successful songwriter Stephen C. Foster combined African and European music to create

American melodies such as “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River.” American architects of this time blended the classical styles of ancient Greece and Rome. This Greek Revival style was used not only for plantation houses in the South but also for the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 7 CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING Analyzing How did American painters set themselves apart from European or British painters? LESSON ACTIVITIES 1. Argumentative Writing Members of Congress agreed to the Missouri Compromise in an attempt to prevent serious conflict. Write a letter to a member of Congress arguing for or against this compromise. 2. Evaluating Claims Work with a partner to come up with one claim each about the foreign policy issues and events covered in this lesson. With another pair of classmates, take turns presenting claims to one another. After each student has spoken, evaluate whether or not you think the claim that student made was convincing, taking into account the text evidence and the way the argument was presented. Decide as a group which of the claims was the strongest.

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