Sometimes the most challenging aspect of creating an engaging history magazine for kids is that there is not a great selection of color images of people that lived 100 (or more) years ago. We might be able to find a basic black-and-white headshot of someone famous, or a museum might offer reproductions of a famous painting, but those images are often static and don’t show action.
The visual options become even slimmer in issues that focus on women and Native Americans. So, I was particularly thrilled to see the final art provided by Wesley Lowe to accompany the description of Black Beaver’s story in Cobblestone’s Civil War Stories You Should Know issue.
Black Beaver served as a guide for the Union army as it made its way from Oklahoma to Kansas during the Civil War. Thanks to Lowe’s talents, not only is Black Beaver brought to life, but the Union cavalry and a sense of the unsettled West are captured, too. The details in the scene and the quality of art are stunning. We strive to make sure that the articles we include provide good, factual content, but when the story we are describing with words is accompanied by fantastic, original, dynamic art, it brings history to new levels of awesome.
