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The Epic of American Civilization

Hanover, United States of America

The Epic of American Civilization

The Epic of American Civilization is a mural by the social realist painter José Clemente Orozco. It is located in the basement reading room of the Baker Memorial Library on the campus of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The mural, painted between 1932 and 1934, consists of a series of 24

fresco panels, whose principal themes are the impact of both indigenous Native Americans and European colonists on North America, and the impact of war (particularly the Mexican Civil War and the First World War) and rapid industrialization on the human spirit. The mural was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2013. Orozco painted the mural during the same time his fellow muralist, Diego Rivera, was working on his murals at the Rockefeller Center in New York. But while Rivera's portrait of Lenin led to his mural being painted over, Orozco was given full political freedom to paint as he chose. His images offended a group of Dartmouth parents who called themselves the Boston Mothers. "We would be everlastingly grateful to you," the mothers wrote to college president Ernest Hopkins, "if the pictures could be destroyed." Another letter to Hopkins was more blunt: "Orozco has shouted forth...

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