Skip to main content

Native American Art In The Denver Art Museum

March 2023
1min read


by Richard Conn The Denver Art Museum 100 color and 400 black-and-white photographs, 351 pages, $40.00 hardbound, $20.00 paperback

Indian art was utilitarian, but it was certainly not primitive. This selection of 500 objects from the Denver Art Museum’s vast holdings of native art, arranged by region and generously captioned, shows how various and ingenious the artists were. No object was too ordinary to decorate. A baby’s cradleboard is intricately carved at the top. A spoon has a fox-head handle. Even a horsewhip has a beautifully beaded wrist strap. This is a feast of a book—riches for the mind, splendor for the eye.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August/September 1979"

Peale’s Greatest Triumph

Authored by: Spencer Klaw

The Messiah of Time and Motion

Authored by: The Editors

So read a welcoming sign over the door of Charles Willson Peale’s great ill-fated museum

Authored by: David E. Stannard

The Brief, Sentimental Age of the Rural Cemetery

Authored by: John Egerton

Nobody was murdered or maimed, but nobody backed down for twenty years in the struggle over school integration in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Who finally won?

Authored by: John J. Pullen

The single greatest medical discovery of the last century began as a parlor game, and brought tragedy to nearly everyone who had a hand in it

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.