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Fine example of this little known "Picture History" compiliation, a large-format color poster that compresses three and a half centuries of American history into a mosaic of seventy-five historical vignettes.
The image area is divided into a tight grid, five rows deep, each compartment labeled with a finely lettered caption. The chronology begins at upper left beneath a billowing 48-star flag: “1492—Columbus”, followed by “Cabot Claims North America”, “Landing of the Vikings”, and so on. From there the eye moves east to west in reading order, advancing through colonial settlements, Revolutionary flashpoints, westward expansion, Civil War battles, and twentieth-century industrial feats. Miniature maps shaded in red illustrate territorial growth at key stages (1783, 1803, 1848). The lower border abandons the grid for a continuous frieze labeled “Transportation”—canoe, Conestoga wagon, side-wheel steamer, electric locomotive, biplane—underscoring progress as the poster’s final theme.
Detail within each cell is simplified but immediately recognizable: the Boston Tea Party shows feathered “Indians” hurling chests; Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie depicts signal flags atop a mast; The Emancipation Proclamation places Lincoln at a writing desk beneath a spread-wing eagle. Small heraldic shields, state flags, and period costumes help differentiate episodes separated by centuries while maintaining visual coherence.
Published in the same decade that saw the rise of classroom wall charts and the popularization of “outline maps,” the Picture History poster functioned as an at-a-glance teaching aid. Its dense iconography allowed instructors to point from scene to scene while narrating the national story.
