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.

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.

American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I and the 1920 Election

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Photo, detail from "James W. Gerard. . . ," 1915, American Leaders Speak
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These 59 sound recordings document speeches by American leaders produced from 1918 to 1920 on the Nation's Forum record label. The speeches—by such prominent public figures as Warren G. Harding, James M. Cox, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Henry Cabot Lodge, John J. Pershing, Will H. Hays, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise—deal for the most part with issues and events related to World War I and the 1920 presidential election. Additional topics include social unrest, Americanism, bolshevism, taxes, and business practices.

Speeches range from one to five minutes in length. A special presentation, "From War to Normalcy," introduces the collection with representative recordings, including Harding's famous pronouncement that Americans need "not nostrums but normalcy." This site includes photographs of speakers and of the actual recording disk labels, as well as text versions of the speeches.

American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900

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Logo, Readex
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This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of documents relevant to early U.S. history, offering full-color facsimile images of approximately 30,000 broadsides and ephemera. Advertisements, campaign literature, poems, juvenile literature, and Civil War envelopes comprise the bulk of the collection, making the archive especially valuable for those interested in early American consumer culture, political campaigns, and literary life. The collection also contains rich information on slavery, Native American relations, and local events—plays, gatherings, and religious events.

Users can browse the archive by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching 18th- and 19th-century North America.

Accessible Archives Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/25/2008 - 22:21
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Image, Godey's Lady's Book, Accessible Archives
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These eight databases present more than 176,000 articles from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers, magazines, books, and genealogical records. Much of the material comes from Pennsylvania and other mid-Atlantic states.

Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1880), one of the most popular 19th-century publications, furnished middle- and upper-class American women with fiction, fashion illustrations, and editorials. The Pennsylvania Gazette (1728–1800), a Philadelphia newspaper, is described as the New York Times of the 18th century. The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective includes major articles from the Charleston Mercury, the New York Herald, and the Richmond Enquirer. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes runs from six newspapers published in New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto between 1827 and 1876. American County Histories to 1900 provides 60 volumes covering the local history of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalogue: Chester County 1809–1870 has been partially digitized, with 25,000 records available. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Record: Delaware County 1819–1870 addresses industrialization in a rural area settled by Quaker farmers.

Ad*Access Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/25/2008 - 22:21
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Image, Timken Roller Bearing Company ad supporting war bonds, 1943, Ad*Access
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Images of more than 7,000 advertisements printed primarily in newspapers and magazines in the United States from 1911 to 1955 appear on this well-developed site. The material is drawn from a collection of one of the oldest and largest advertising agencies, the J. Walter Thompson Company.

Advertisements are divided into five main subjects areas: Radio (including radios, radio parts, and programs); television (including television sets and programs); transportation (including airlines, rental cars, buses, trains, and ships); beauty and hygiene (including cosmetics, soaps, and shaving supplies); and World War II (U.S. Government-related, such as V-mail and bond drives). Ads are searchable by keyword, type of illustration, and special features. A timeline from 1915 to 1955 provides general context. "About Ad Access" furnishes an overview of advertising history, as well as a bibliography and list of advertising repositories.

Television News of the Civil Rights Era

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Image for Television News of the Civil Rights Era
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was covered on news stations around the country. This website provides 230 of these video clips from two local television stations in Roanoke, Virginia. Clips feature both national events, such as the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, as well as footage of local school desegregation, protests, and interviews on the street.

Accompanying this footage are 14 oral histories (several from Virginians with firsthand knowledge of the Prince Edward Public Schools closing), and 23 documents that chronicle the official development of Massive Resistance in Virginia, in particularly the involvement of Senator Harry F. Byrd. "Essays and Interpretation" provides important historical context and analysis, with detailed pieces on "Virginia's Massive Resistance to School Desegregation" and the development of television news coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia and Mississippi.

Mexican-American War and the Media

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These more than 5,500 transcribed newspaper articles related to the Mexican-American War represent five newspapers from the U.S. and England. They span the period from 1845, when the U.S. annexed Texas, through 1848, when Mexico surrendered and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.

The contrast between coverage of the war in the U.S. and England is particularly striking. The Times of London fulminated against the immorality of slavery and of the southern scheme to annex Texas as a slave state, while exposing America's imperialist ambitions as, among other things, an attempt to shore up the nation's fragile stability through the escape valve of western migration. By contrast, newspapers from Maryland and West Virginia did not examine the issue of slavery in the articles included here.

Some images and links to watercolor and print collections are also available. The website provides a comprehensive bibliography on the war, but offers little historical background or contextualization beyond links to related materials and an expanded timeline.

Margaret Sanger Papers Project

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Selected materials by and about the "birth control pioneer" Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) are provided here. A link to a companion site offers approximately 200 documents dealing with The Woman Rebel, Sanger's 1914 radical feminist monthly, for which she was indicted and tried for violation of federal obscenity laws.

The project plans to digitize more than 600 of Sanger's speeches and articles. At present, there are 25 transcribed speeches, 182 newspaper articles from 1911–1921, four public statements, a letter written by Sanger in 1915, and more than 50 articles from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, some of which contain primary source materials. There are plans to add to items regularly. Materials also include 27 links to sites offering Sanger writings, a biographical essay, and a bibliography. Links to collections of images and an MP3 file of Margaret Sanger's 1953 "This I Believe" speech are also available.