Art That Changed History

Art That Changed History: Paintings, songs, novels, films, and posters have toppled governments, launched movements, and rewritten how nations see themselves. Rulers have always understood this, which is why art has been commissioned as propaganda, banned as sedition, and smuggled past censors. From revolutionary canvases in Paris to protest songs in Lagos, some works of art have moved history as powerfully as any army or election.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852. The best selling novel of the nineteenth century sold 300,000 copies in America in its first year and turned millions of Northern readers against slavery. It was banned across much of the South, and legend claims Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe as the little woman who started the Civil War.

Guernica: Pablo Picasso, 1937. Painted in response to the Nazi bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, it toured the world raising money for refugees. Picasso refused to let it enter Spain until democracy returned, so it only arrived in 1981. In 2003 a tapestry copy at the United Nations was covered up while the case for the Iraq War was presented.

Liberty Leading the People: Eugene Delacroix, 1830. Painted to celebrate the July Revolution that toppled King Charles X of France. The new government bought it, then hid it from public view for years, fearing it would inspire another uprising. Its bare chested Liberty became a template for Marianne, the national symbol of France.

Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, 1939. Written as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, after he saw a photo of a lynching. Holiday's label Columbia refused to record it, so she took it to a small independent label. Time later named it the song of the century, often called the opening shot of the civil rights movement.

We Shall Overcome: Traditional, popularized by Pete Seeger and others, 1940s. Rooted in a gospel hymn and sung by striking tobacco workers in 1945, it became the anthem of the civil rights movement. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson ended a speech to Congress with its title words, and Martin Luther King Jr. was seen in tears watching.

The Death of Marat: Jacques Louis David, 1793. David painted the murdered French revolutionary like a Christian martyr, turning a political assassination into sacred propaganda. It was copied and paraded as a revolutionary icon, then hidden away when the political winds shifted and David himself was jailed.

The Jungle: Upton Sinclair, 1906. Sinclair wrote it to expose the brutal lives of immigrant meatpacking workers, but readers fixated on the rats and rot in their food. Within months Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair joked he aimed for the public's heart and hit its stomach instead.

Finlandia: Jean Sibelius, 1899. Composed as a protest against Russian censorship of Finland, it became so politically charged that it was performed under disguised titles to slip past imperial censors. Its hymn section is now one of Finland's most beloved national songs.

Va, Pensiero: Giuseppe Verdi, 1842. This chorus of Hebrew slaves from the opera Nabucco became the unofficial anthem of Italian unification. Patriots scrawled Viva VERDI on walls as a code for Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia, and crowds spontaneously sang the chorus at his funeral in 1901.

The Marriage of Figaro: Pierre Beaumarchais, 1784. A comedy in which a clever servant outwits his aristocratic master. King Louis XVI tried to keep it off the stage, and Napoleon later called it the Revolution already in action. Mozart turned it into one of the most performed operas in history two years later.

Hope Poster: Shepard Fairey, 2008. Designed in a single day as an unofficial street poster for Barack Obama, it became the defining image of his campaign. The Associated Press sued over the source photograph, and the original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange, 1936. Shot in about ten minutes at a starving pea pickers camp in California, the photo ran in newspapers and pushed the federal government to rush 20,000 pounds of food to the camp. It became the face of the Great Depression, though the woman in it, Florence Owens Thompson, was never paid.

Ode to Joy: Ludwig van Beethoven, 1824. The finale of the Ninth Symphony became the anthem of European unity. On Christmas Day 1989, weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein conducted it in Berlin and changed the word Freude, joy, to Freiheit, freedom.

Leningrad Symphony: Dmitri Shostakovich, 1941. Its score was smuggled out of the USSR on microfilm and broadcast across America as wartime propaganda. In 1942 starving musicians performed it inside besieged Leningrad while loudspeakers blasted it toward German lines, after Soviet artillery shelled the enemy to keep them quiet during the concert.

Zombie: Fela Kuti, 1976. The song mocked Nigerian soldiers as mindless zombies following orders. Soon after, about a thousand soldiers stormed his compound, the Kalakuta Republic, burned it, and threw his mother from a window. She later died from her injuries, and Fela delivered a coffin to the military headquarters in protest.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika: Enoch Sontonga, 1897. Written as a hymn by a Methodist schoolteacher, it became the anthem of the anti apartheid struggle and was sung at rallies and funerals across South Africa. After apartheid ended, it was fused with the old Afrikaans anthem to create the country's national anthem, sung in five languages.

Punk Prayer: Pussy Riot, 2012. A performance lasting less than a minute inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, begging the Virgin Mary to chase Vladimir Putin away. Two members were sentenced to two years in prison camps, turning the band into a global symbol of resistance to the Kremlin.

Triumph of the Will: Leni Riefenstahl, 1935. A film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, using pioneering camera techniques to make Hitler look godlike. It won top prizes in Venice and Paris and remains the textbook case of how cinema can manufacture a cult of personality.

The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, 1915. A technical landmark that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Woodrow Wilson screened it at the White House, and the Klan, dormant for decades, was refounded that same year and used the film as a recruiting tool. Protests by the NAACP made it one of the first great battles over film censorship.

The Day After: Nicholas Meyer, 1983. A TV movie about nuclear war watched by roughly 100 million Americans. Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that it left him greatly depressed, and it is credited with nudging him toward the 1987 arms control treaty with the Soviet Union.

Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera, 1933. Commissioned for Rockefeller Center in New York, the mural included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. When Rivera refused to remove it, the Rockefellers had the entire mural chiseled off the wall. Rivera recreated it in Mexico City, where it still stands.

Mississippi Goddam: Nina Simone, 1964. Written in a fury after the murder of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing, it was Simone's first protest song. Radio stations across the South banned it, and one returned a whole crate of the records snapped in half.

I Want You for U.S. Army: James Montgomery Flagg, 1917. More than four million copies of the Uncle Sam poster were printed during World War I. Flagg saved the cost of a model by painting his own face, and the image was revived for World War II.

We Can Do It!: J. Howard Miller, 1943. Now known as Rosie the Riveter, the poster was made for Westinghouse factories and displayed for only about two weeks. It was almost unknown during the war, then rediscovered in the 1980s and turned into a global feminist icon.