|
In a hurry? Save or print these Collection Connections as a single file.
Go directly to the collection, The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920: Photographs from the Fred Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collections, in American Memory, or view a Summary of Resources related to the collection.
The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920 is comprised of the Hultstrand and Pazandak collections from the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University. It contains nine hundred photographs of rural and small-town life in North Dakota and the surrounding Great Plains between the years 1880 and 1920. Documenting a period of dramatic change, these photographs offer views of both frontier life and the emergence of modern America that can be easily integrated into K-12 historical studies whenever the themes of frontier settlement, westward expansion, agricultural production, and independent third party politics are taught. The collection has a total of nine Special Presentations, referenced throughout these documents, that help to make the images relevant and meaningful.
1) Agriculture and Industrialization
|
Straddling two time periods, The Development of the Industrial United States (1876-1915) and The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), this collection provides an excellent opportunity to explore the role of agriculture in industrializing and modernizing America.
The industrialization of the late nineteenth century fueled the final surge westward across the Great Plains. Settlers found that farming the arid land of this region required new, large-scale dry-farming methods and this need fueled the swift growth of the farm equipment industry. With this growth, more land came under cultivation between 1870 and 1900 than in the previous 250 years, bringing the American frontier to a close. Students can trace the changes in farming methods and technology in the Special Presentation "Implements Used on the Farm" and in the three Presentations of the Pazandak Collection. They can also compare images of the same subject taken at different times, reflecting change. Suggested subjects include Agricultural laborers, Binding grain, Drill, Hay racks, Harvesting, and Threshing.
|
|
Horse powered threshing rig, Blue Earth, Minnesota, 1898.
Threshing with International "15-30" tractor.
|
2) Modernizing America
Double cylinder engine, twin smokestacks : booklet of Minneapolis Machine Co., page 1.
Browse the collection to gain perspective on modern culture. Highlights are found by searching ice, general store, and laundry.
|
|
|
New inventions, forms of communication, and methods of production and distribution all contributed to a modern mass culture. Students can search electrical, telephone, automobile, airplane, and advertisement for evidence of these turn-of-the-century innovations. They can also search Sears Roebuck for images of a prefabricated house and then visit Prosperity and Thrift, 1921-1929 or Consumers and Catalogues to find out more about the development of the modern consumer culture and its expansion from urban centers into rural America. (Consumers and Catalogues is found outside of the Library of Congress web site. If you have a slow modem, click here to skip its animated introduction).
|
Market Day, 6/5/12, Park River, N.D..
|
One of the early horseless carriages.
|
|
3) Settlement
|
As the Midwest filled up, immigration to the western United States increased. Students can learn more about immigrants and their impact upon the settlement of the Northern Great Plains in a Special Presentation on Immigrants or by searching Czech-Americans, Icelandic-Americans, Norwegian-Americans, German-Americans, Swedish-Americans, Danish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Canadian-Americans, and British-Americans. In addition to captions and visual content, take note of the summaries that appear below the captions in the bibliographic information. Exploring settlement, students will also get a broader perspective of immigration than is afforded by the traditional focus upon the Ellis Island experience.
While people shaped the settlement of the Northern Great Plains, the environment of the region influenced this process as well. Search sod houses, town, and snow for images that will help students to better comprehend the sheer effort of migration and settlement, especially in a region with little timber and extreme weather.
|
|
Early residents of Park River, N.D..
|
| Students may understand the demands of settlement
upon individuals by closely examining images of men, women, and children, their
activities on the frontier, and the places where they learned, worked, and played.
Search children,
boy, girl, family, play, home, and interior
and consider the following questions.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Self
preservation is the first law of life. |
|
Elling
Ohnstad sod house, Fairdale, North Dakota, June 24, 1923. |
|
|
- What would have been involved in building and maintaining a sod house? What
would it have been like to live in one?
- What did children do for fun? How would school
on the frontier have been different from school today? What chores and tasks
did children do at home or on the farm?
- How did parents provide food, shelter, safety, transportation, and clothing
for their families? What search words would you use to find out?
The collection is particularly explicit about the many roles women played in frontier
society. Many historians argue that frontier women developed a special kind of
independence and equality that eastern women did not. Can students support this
argument with photographs from the collection? See the Special
Presentation on Women or search
the collection.
|
4) Community
|
The collection supports an exploration of the nature and role of community on the frontier. What is community? What was the significance of community on the frontier? How was a sense of community created? How do modern day communities differ from frontier communities? Students can browse the Subject Index or conduct searches for images of neighborhood gatherings, weddings, churches, and soda shops that will help them understand how people socialized and supported each other, and what events and places drew people together. Teachers can challenge students to find as many different examples of frontier community as possible.
|
Lars Wall barbershop, Milton, North Dakota.
|
|
One element of community well represented in the collection, and highlighted in a Special Presentation, is schools. What do the many photographs of school houses in the collection suggest about the people of the Northern Great Plains? What does the multitude of these images suggest about the photographer? Many of these schools were public institutions. Why might the Government have set aside so much money to establish schools on the frontier? What other roles did State and Federal Government play in the frontier? (Students might want to explore Prosperity and Thrift, 1921-1929 and Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920). What do these roles suggest about attitudes toward the frontier and its communities?
Barn-warming party
at the Joe Pazandak farm.
|
5) Native Americans
While by the end of the nineteenth century the nation had become an advanced
industrialized society, it was also still absorbed in conquering a continent,
with settlers streaming to isolated farms in the West as Native Americans were
pushed off their homeland. The collection's Special Presentation of "Native
Americans" in the "North
Dakota Historical Overview" provides information about the history of Native
Americans of the Great Plains, while a few of the collection's pictures document
a particularly difficult chapter in their history. These images are found by searching
Indians, bison, and rosebud. Viewed along with images of
settlement, they facilitate discussion of the costs of settlement in the depletion
of natural resources, the threat this posed to the Native American way of life,
and the forced removal of these people from their homeland.
|
