Theodore Roosevelt and the 1912 Election

Teaser

Students learn more about the larger than life figure of Theodore Roosevelt through sources related to the presidential election of 1912. 

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Description

Students learn about Theodore Roosevelt the man and his 1912 third party campaign for president.

Article Body

In this teaching module from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation in collaboration with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Mediastudents learn how to examine engaging primary sources that surround the dramatic 1912 presidential campaign in which Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate after having served as president from 1901 to 1909. During the campaign Roosevelt was the victim of an assassination attempt while speaking in Milwaukee and several of the documents relate to this event and how it affected Roosevelt and the campaign.

Students work in small groups to analyze sources to better understand Theodore Roosevelt, the person, and the issues that most concerned Americans during the 1912 campaign. Primary sources include letters from Roosevelt providing an account of his assassination and an update on his recovery. Other sources relate to the campaign itself and the Bull Moose or Progressive Party that Roosevelt ran under. Students are also encouraged to think through how Roosevelt's personality made him an attractive candidate.

After analyzing these primary sources students work in groups to create their own campaign materials for Roosevelt. Teachers have the option of having students create physical posters or pamphlets or to have students use digital tools to create their promotional materials. The modules also contain guidance on differentiation for diverse learners and connections to standards.  

Topic
Theodore Roosevelt and the 1912 presidential campain
Time Estimate
90 minutes
flexibility_scale
2
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art

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Logo, Native Tech website
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This site is dedicated to the history and continuing development of Native American technology and arts. It is designed and maintained by Tara Prindle, an archeologist on the Program and Events Committee of the Nipmuc Indian Association of Connecticut. A 500-word historical essay and five to ten illustrated descriptions of techniques introduce each of the 12 sections, including beadwork, stonework and tools, pottery, poetry, and food. A section on beadwork presents seven photos of 18th-century beadwork alongside six technical drawings. For five different kinds of beadwork, from bone to glass, the site provides between ten and 100 illustrations of beads. A section on wigwams contains nine pages of writings about wigwams from the 17th century as well as a photographic guide to building your own wigwam. Special features include more than 50 links to sites about Ojibwe language, history, art, and culture and a collection of illustrated essays (400-1,500 words) about Seminole men's clothing. Links to 58 sites about contemporary issues in Native American art, such as counterfeiting, and more than 100 Native American clubs and message boards. A useful site for research in Native American cultural and material history.

American Indians of the Pacific Northwest

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northwest indians
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These 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text focus on the lives of American Indians in the Northwest Coast and Plateau regions of the Pacific Northwest. Materials illustrate housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, employment, and other aspects of everyday life among American Indians in this region. Most of the photographs were taken before 1920.

Texts include more than 3,800 pages from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior from 1851 through 1908; 89 Pacific Northwest Quarterly articles from 1906—1998; and 23 titles in the University of Washington Publications in Anthropology series. The site also offers 14 maps and 10 lengthy essays authored by anthropologists on specific tribal groups and cross-cultural topics.

Teaching about Presidential Elections

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A wealth of historical material exists on the web to support teaching about presidential elections.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) uncovers the mysteries of the Electoral College through text, documents, interactives, and links to K–12 curricular resources.

HarpWeek's Explore History offers political cartoons and prints from presidential elections between 1860 to 1912. Other materials include an up-close look at the controversies surrounding the Hayes vs. Tilden election of 1876 with explanatory essays and primary source materials drawn from Harper's Weekly.

HistoryCentral.com supplies statistics on all U.S. presidential elections. For each election year, the site presents graphs showing popular and electoral votes, maps of states won by each candidate, vote count, and voter turnout statistics.

America Votes at the Duke University Special Collections Library compiles presidential election memorabilia with brief background information on critical issues in selected campaigns. The materials illustrate that political spin and negative campaigning are not new inventions.

Old Political Cartoons

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Teddy Roosevelt as bullmoose, E. W. Kemble, Harpers Weekly, July 20, 1912
Question

What issues influence a person’s interpretation of a political cartoon from the past?

Answer

To understand a political cartoon from the past, you have to have a good understanding of the historical events and persons depicted in it, as well as an appreciation of the symbolic currency of the time, specifically, the stock characters and objects that contemporary artists and commentators used to carry their points. This might include such things as the songs, music, poetry, literature, sports, clothes fashions, and celebrity figures of the time. Without this last sort of knowledge, you are liable to miss the point of the cartoon—or at least the sharpness of the point.

You could read into it, for example, today’s meaning of the words and symbols that the artist used, when in fact, it may have changed. The artist and his audience inhabited the same culture and may have shared assumptions that we may not. Bringing these into the light not only reveals the actual intent of the cartoonist, but also reveals to us how parts of our own cultural and political landscape have changed.

History teachers nowadays often introduce political cartoons from the past into their lessons, asking their students to analyze them. Partly, this stems from trends in social history that have newly emphasized the value of looking at the more everyday, ephemeral aspects of culture in trying to understand the past. Partly, too, it stems from the notion that today’s students are much more attuned to visual images than to written texts. Lastly, it fits into the educational emphasis on introducing students to multiple primary sources rather than relying exclusively on the synthetic, authoritative, and detached narrative of a textbook.

On this last point, teachers should not lose sight of the fact that, while old political cartoons are primary sources, opening clear windows into another time, they were created to comment on the people and events depicted, most often by use of written and visual satire, parody, and humor.

Why note this seemingly obvious point? Because surrounding a political cartoon with an elaborate array of serious analytical probes in a classroom lesson—as necessary as it might be—also endangers the patient under the scalpel. At some point in the operation being performed upon it in the classroom, it would seem worthwhile to deliberately step back and simply ask whether the cartoon is “alive,” that is, funny and why it would have been seen as funny when it was created.

For more information

Michael O’Malley, “Analyzing Political Cartoons,” History Matters

Online examples of how teachers use political cartoons in the classroom: a Vietnam War-era cartoon, and cartoons about school desegregation and “massive resistance” in Virginia during the 1950s.

"Teaching with Documents: Lesson Plans” at the National Archives and Records Administration includes a cartoon analysis worksheet that can be used to help guide students into understanding historical political cartoons.

The Library of Congress has a collection of online exhibitions and presentations about political cartoons.

Harper’s Weekly, Cartoon of the Day.

Joe Jelen on Political Cartoons 2.0

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colored lithograph, A weak ticket in the field, 1880 June 16, James Albert Wales
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Since Revolutionary times, political cartoonists in America have used their art to comment on the political and social landscape. While political cartoons in newsprint fade away, political cartoons have found a new home online and in social media. These cartoons often pack their punch with metaphors and subtle humor, which can leave students perplexed when unwrapping their meaning. However, grappling with this confusion through careful analysis can help students become politically savvy citizens.

Finding Political Cartoons

Whether you are looking for the latest political cartoons or cartoons from the past, a number of useful repositories exist for your use.

One of the best places to find today’s political cartoons comes from the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC). The site features several cartoons daily. In addition, the AAEC along with NIEonline.com maintains Cartoons for the Classroom, which features a weekly downloadable lesson and links to historical political cartoons.

For a weekly collection of cartoons, MSNBC posts the Week in Political Cartoons, which might be a useful way to review the week’s headlines with students.

Of course, you should also check out your local newspaper for political cartoons related to politics in your state or city.

If you are looking for political cartoons from the past be sure to visit the Library of Congress. A simple search of the Library’s online content reveals hundreds of cartoons available for download, many from the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition, the Library of Congress maintains this collection from the famous Herblock. Herb "Herblock" Block was active from 1929 to 2000, and his cartoons provide a liberal perspective on 20th-century political topics.

For Civil War and Reconstruction era cartoons, HarpWeek maintains a historical database of cartoons that appeared in Harper’s Weekly (published from 1857 to 1916). In the “Cartoon of the Day” collection, one can browse cartoons by topics, people, or places. Each cartoon is accompanied by a detailed explanation of its historical context and bibliographic information.

Interpreting Political Cartoons

There are countless ways to help students make sense of political cartoons. To start making cartoon analysis routine in your classroom, you may want to download the Library of Congress’s Political Cartoon Analysis Sheet or the National Archive’s Cartoon Analysis Worksheet.

For a more in-depth approach to interpreting political cartoons, "It's No Laughing Matter" a webpage created by the Library of Congress, can help students better understand political cartoons. In addition to resources for teachers, the site has a great interactive lesson that helps students identify techniques used frequently in political cartoons. This unit plan from ReadWriteThink also provides a series of useful high school-level lessons for interpreting political cartoons.

If you find students struggle with analyzing elements of a political cartoon, try narrowing their focus.

If you find students struggle with analyzing elements of a political cartoon, try narrowing their focus. Have students examine one quadrant of the cartoon at a time and ask them to decipher what is happening. Often political cartoons have a lot of detail that can distract students from the overall message. In this case, a zoom-in inquiry could also help focus student attention. Along the same line, a document camera could be used to focus on specific elements of a cartoon to prevent students from bogging down in the details. It may also be helpful to have a scholar model the interpretation of a political cartoon. Here, historian Mike O’Malley analyzes a Thomas Nast cartoon related to the gold standard.

Have students practice interpreting political cartoons at home by creating a VoiceThread. You can upload a cartoon and have students identify elements of the cartoon with a video marker and add their commentary or questions (see an example).

Web Tools for Creating Political Cartoons

Why not take students to the top of the new Bloom’s taxonomy and have them create their own political cartoons? With many web tools available, students need not worry about their drawing ability. Teaching History With Technology reviews several sites for creating comics online.

Political cartoons offer a great deal of content, if students are given the right tools to access and analyze it. The many websites now available for finding cartoons and helping make sense of them give us the resources to practice high-order thinking skills with students through interpreting and creating political cartoons. We should, therefore, give students ample opportunity to explore these cartoons in and out of the classroom.

For more information

Watch historians analyze political cartoons on the gold standard, the presidential election of 1932, massive resistance, and the My Lai Massacre in Examples of Historical Thinking.

Try Jonathan Burack's guidelines for interpreting political cartoons in Teaching Guides. John Buescher offers more advice in Ask a Historian.

See award-winning teacher Stacy Hoeflich introduce her 4th-grade students to a political cartoon in Teaching in Action.

Test your students' analytical skills with our quizzes on a Thomas Nast cartoon and a cartoon on massive resistance.

Humor's Edge

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Cartoon, The Bush Decision, Supreme Court overturns recount
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Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes recently donated 81 of her cartoons to the Library of Congress. Those cartoons make up the entire collection of this site, which is searchable by keyword. Each cartoon is displayed with the size, format, medium, and publication date. The cartoons were published between 1996 and 2001, and each addresses a political or cultural issue from a domestic or international perspective. Although limited in holdings and scope, the site could be quite useful for those researching late 20th-century topics in political culture.

Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials, 1952-2008

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Still, from 2008 Democrat campaign commercial "Steel."
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This website presents more than 250 commercials that appeared on American television sets beginning in 1952 to sell presidential candidates to the public. Advertisements from each election, including the 2008 campaigns, are accessible by year as well as by common themes and strategies used over time, such as Commander in Chief, Fear, Children, and Real People. Advertisements are also browsable by issue, such as civil rights, corruption, war, taxes, and welfare.

This collection includes well-known ads such as the Daisy Ad and well-known public figures, such as Harry Belafonte's advertisement in support of Kennedy, as well as many others that may be less familiar in the 21st century. Essays focus on analyzing advertising strategies of major party candidates and a program guide presents a history of the usage of television commercials in campaigns.

1896: The Presidential Campaign

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freesilvercartoon
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The election of 1896 was one of the most contentious in U.S. history. When Republican William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan on November 3rd, there were no fewer than six candidates on the ballot and the country was in the throes of an economic depression. This website provides close to 100 political cartoons surrounding the election campaigns.

The website acts like a virtual web of knowledge, with linked words in almost every sentence leading to helpful chunks of information on key themes, political parties and their leaders, print culture, and popular culture. Together, this information sheds light not only on the political situation in the 1890s, but also on the social, economic, and cultural contexts of the era. Special sections are devoted to, among many other topics, the bicycle craze, antisemitism, popular amusements, the Supreme Court, and women's suffrage. An extensive bibliography and a section devoted to teaching suggestions are also included.

Election Statistics

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Photo, Introductory graphic, Office of the Clerk
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Provides vote counts for nominees in all federal elections from 1920 to 2000. These counts were compiled from official sources in states and territories and published by the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The statistics for elections prior to 1992 are available as scanned images of published documents in PDF format; results from elections held in 1992 and after are offered in HTML in addition to PDF format. Valuable for those studying 20th-century U.S. political history.