We all know the images.

A general at the bow of a boat, looking resolutely toward the New Jersey shore. An American president, photographed the year an assassin ended his life. A woman whose lined face highlights the despair of the Great Depression.

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Mark Davis/mrdavis@ajc.com

Janet Brown, curriculum coordinator at Christ the King Catholic School, talks about some of the images in ‘Picturing America,’ a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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For more information, go to the National Endowment for the Humanities Web site, www.neh.gov.

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Those pictures: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1851; “Abraham Lincoln,” an Alexander Gardner photo, 1865; and “Migrant Mother and Children,” Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photo.

Reproductions of those images and dozens more are coming to classrooms across the country in “Picturing America,” an initiative launched this year by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Forty pictures, encompassing paintings, photos, architecture, jewelry and handmade works of art, showcase American history and culture.

On Tuesday, with school kids and teachers watching, the federal agency unveiled the images at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. In the metro area, 121 schools and libraries that applied to the NEH to receive the pictures will be getting them soon. Statewide, 807 schools and libraries have qualified. Nationwide, more than 26,000 educational centers are scheduled to get the images. Twenty-thousand Head Start programs will get them, too.

And that’s just a start, said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, in Atlanta for the unveiling. In October, the endowment will accept a second round of applications from educators, librarians and others who want to adorn their walls with the images. Each package, funded with public and private money, costs about $100, he said.

“There’s a real hunger for this,” said Cole. “It gets art back in the schools, and that’s something we’re eager to do.”

The art covers nearly a millennium. It ranges from pottery created by indigenous peoples 900 years ago to “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” sculpted by Martin Puryear in 1996.

“Picturing America” includes:

• The Chrysler Building, an art deco skyscraper in Manhattan designed by William Van Alen. Competed in 1930, it is a gleaming study of form and function.

• “Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965,” a James Karales photo that captures, in black and white, the resolve of civil-rights marchers, black and white.

• “Fallingwater,” the name architect Frank Lloyd Wright coined to describe a house he designed. Finished in 1939, it is perched over a waterfall, elbowed into a mountain, melded into its surroundings.

• “The Last of the Mohicans,” N.C. Wyeth’s 1919 portrait that graced the cover James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the same name. It is an idealized image of the Native American — proof, too, that a tattooed, bare-chested human can muster as much dignity as one clad in tails.

The images so impressed Michael Bresnahan that he stopped his 10-year-old wiggling. A fifth-grader at Christ the King Catholic School, the Buckhead boy stared at Lange’s photo of the Dust Bowl mom. He studied the children who hid behind her thin shoulders.

Michael, who would like to be a running back in the NFL one day, considered her plight. “You could tell she was working hard to save her family,” he said.

You could tell, too, that he had a new picture of America.