(gentle music) (birds chirping) (patriotic music) - The time period when Thomas Cole was painting was a very disruptive and I would say stressful time for a lot of Americans, and Thomas Cole certainly felt that.

So much was changing.

They were largely in a rural country.

Farming was predominant.

And then, all of a sudden, these industrial changes came in and it displaced a lot of people who had been used to the old way of life.

(gentle music) In addition to that, it was the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency.

And so the whole nature of politics was changed and people were very afraid of what that might mean for our country.

It was in the lead up to the Civil War, and we noticed that we were fighting with each other and not getting along, and it wasn't that easy to have a harmonious country in which we agreed on everything.

So a lot of the things that we are now dealing with in American life have its roots in this period when Thomas Cole was working.

- Yeah, the history between really 1800 and 1848 is based a lot on locality, say that.

So there's, you know, the War of 1812, which many historians look at because it's international, it's a major important piece, especially in the northern part of New York State and in the southern parts.

This is also, in New York, the era of the Great Awakening.

So we have this movement of religious revivalism that's taking place.

- Many of the immigrants from New England were evangelical Protestants and brought their religious beliefs to upstate New York, and it became what was known as the Burned Over District during the Second Great Awakening, because there was this religious fervor and there were new religions being developed.

Like Mormonism, for example, began in New York State in Palmyra.

The Millerites began in Washington County.

The temperance movement became a very large movement in New York State.

The suffrage movement in New York State began in Seneca Falls, where the first Women's Suffrage Convention really was the leader in North America for the suffrage movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton being the driving force behind that, or one of the driving forces behind that.

So it was a time of great change economically and with demographics, but it was also a time of great change as far as new movements and new religious beliefs.

- We also have a lot of international changes when it comes to trade.

So you have larger historians, or the field in general, focusing on a lot of those kind of national and international things.

In New York State, they're connecting to those ideas, but they tend not to look so much at the diversity in the state.

They'll look at local communities, because they're along the Erie Canal, and those get built during that time and, again, that's connecting to the trade and how urban developments or urban development happens, but not necessarily how the people themselves are operating at all those different locations and how that connects to national politics, unless it has to do with money.

Though abolition is unfolding at the same time, and that tends to be connected to say Black history largely, when you just look at general history, it tends to be economic, it tends to be war, and then state focused on the big investments that are happening.

- The wealth and the success of the United States was predicated on the sort of oppression of Indigenous persons and its enslaved Black population as well.

Whenever we think about, I think, the success of American culture, I think we also need to look during that time period at persons who were oppressed economically to make it possible for the United States to thrive.

And then, to be able to enter into this, like, world war at the second kind of half of the period where we're looking at.

- When we later on get into the American Revolution and "Declaration of Independence," "Constitution," and all of those, in the "Declaration of Independence," Thomas Jefferson specifically uses the word savage and merciless when he talks about Indigenous peoples, "The merciless Indian savages," it's the line in the document.

And those words also then are, again, used to talk about the land that people took from Indigenous peoples in order to cultivate these new cities, like the one we're sitting in today.

(gentle music) - Paintings serve as sociopolitical and economic documents.

We're able to visually read them as a broader discussion of what's happening at a time and place.

And so when we think about the American landscape movement, the Hudson River School in particular, and artists like Thomas Cole, that we consider to be a founding father of the genre, really creates these moments where Americans are seeing the landscape, many of them for the first time, places that would become famous sites for vacations and traversing the landscape.

It's a time period in which so soon really after the completion of the American Revolution and we're in these moments of, is democracy going to work?

Is it just an experiment?

And so the American landscape comes to represent something incredibly important about our own sense of national identity.

"This is what we fought for and this is what it looks like."

(gentle music) For many people, these images became these nostalgic salves.

People look to the landscape, these almost idealistic visions of America's past and present, as a way to understand the current moment.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Sponsored in part by Albany Medical Health Systems, and by Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi.

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