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This web site is designed to be used by both teachers and students, but it is intended for you, the teacher, to direct student learning.
For Teachers includes an overview essay on each of the seven historical themes addressed on this site, as well as a series of images related to each theme. Learn more
For Students contains the selected images for all seven themes, simple captions, and a series of six questions for each image. Questions are arranged according to Bloom's taxonomy; the first questions address observation and recall, while the final questions require more complex and abstract levels of thinking—analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Learn more
Resources includes examples of photo analysis sheets as well as additional questions you may want to use to address Virginia SOLs. Other images related to each theme are accessible through our online catalog. Learn more
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Introduction
The discipline of history is grounded in reading, and one of the challenges teachers face is trying to teach history to students who for one reason or another have a difficult time reading English. In addition, the Virginia Standards of Learning require that students, as early as the fourth grade, be able to "identify and interpret artifacts and primary and secondary source documents to understand events in history"—a task which often requires reading at a higher level.
"Teaching with Photographs" includes more than 150 digitized images from the Virginia Historical Society's collection that can be used to address themes in post–1865 Virginia and American history. These images address historical themes such as education, industrialization, urbanization, transportation, the changing roles of women, the development of Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.
We have chosen to address these seven specific topic areas (listed below) for several reasons. First, we feel they reflect the most important themes in Virginia and American history over the last century. Also, our collections are rich in all these areas (with the exception of the civil rights era, which is why we have included images from the archives of the Richmond Times-Dispatch). Finally, these areas are ones that allow students to develop what history educators call "historical habits of mind" by evaluating continuity and change over time. Even if we do not ask the question directly, your students will look at the images and ask themselves how things today are different and how they are the same. We also hope they will see the overlap among the various themes. Is a picture depicting white women making cigars a picture about women, industrialization, or Jim Crow?
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For most of history, humans have lived in a four-mile-an-hour world. People traveled only as fast as their feet, their animals, or the wind could carry them. This began to change early in the nineteenth century with the introduction of steam power, but the real changes in this area have occurred over the past century with the development of the gasoline-powered engine.
Go to Transportation
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The 1920 census revealed that, for the first time, more Americans were living in urban areas rather than rural ones. In Virginia, however, this transition did not occur for another thirty years. Moving from the farm to the city involved more than just a change of location. City residents commute to work; they are paid on a regular basis; they measure time with clocks and calendars; and they live close enough to other people to allow for the development of social clubs, baseball teams, and political organizations.
Go to Urbanization
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This section goes hand-in-hand with the one above. The industrial revolution led to increased migration to the cities, and consequently we deal with the two themes together. It is important to remember, however, that industrialization also occurred in the rural areas that provided the raw materials that fueled American industry.
Go to Industrialization
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Virginia was one of the last states to grant married women the right to own property in their own names. It was also the last state to ratify the Women's Suffrage Amendment, which it did as a symbolic gesture in 1952. And although they waged a vigorous campaign for women's suffrage, Virginia women were often divided over gender issues as their identities as women were also shaped by race, class, and region.
Go to Women
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Despite the rapid urbanization that occurred in the early twentieth century, a majority of Virginians lived in rural areas until World War II. Their lives were very different from those of Virginia's urban residents. Agricultural life had its own unique rhythms. And technological change was slower to come to rural areas. For example, while many urban residents had electricity in their homes by 1900, 90 percent of Virginia's farms were still without electric power three decades later.
Go to Rural Life
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The Virginia Constitution of 1869 mandated that the state operate a public school system. Many elites opposed public education, believing rural children needed only rudimentary instruction in reading and writing. Nonetheless, public schools quickly became popular with the masses and, in the late nineteenth century, proved to be one of the few issue on which many white and black Virginians agreed. Like other facets of Virginia society, public schools remained racially segregated until the 1960s.
Go to Education
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For most of American history, most white Americans believed that they were superior to black Americans. Until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, only a handful of northern states had extended the right to vote to African Americans. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe quickly adopted the racial attitudes that predominated in American society, and laws in both the north and the south reflected those prejudices. It took the modern civil rights movement, often called "America's Second Reconstruction," to bring full, legal equality.
Go to Jim Crow to Civil Rights
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