This reference traces the historical background of editorial cartooning and presents works that chronicle the history and criticize the aesthetics of the art. It also describes anthologies and exhibition catalogs that reprint editorial cartoons, and provides a list of libraries, museums, and historical societies which house originals and photocopies or clippings of editorial cartoons. This expansive volume examines the American editorial cartoon from its beginnings in 1747 into the second Clinton administration. It fills a gap in the literature, providing comprehensive information on a field of growing interest to scholars and collectors. This reference guide studies the evolution of editorial cartooning and places it in its historical context and provides appreciation and criticism of the cartoons presented. In addition to political cartoons, underground, radical, and propaganda cartoons are also discussed in this volume. The appendixes offer important cross-reference tools such as a chronology and include listings of selected historical periodicals, theses, and dissertations covering political cartoons. This work will be of value to a broad spectrum of readers—from collectors to scholars—and is suitable for many fields of study.

American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings--of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk--served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation--arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices--and not a blissful celebration of American democracy--that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

The Image of America traces the development of American history and culture through more than two centuries of caricature and cartoon. Through the acerbic eyes of both American and foreign artists it portrays our history in dramatic tone-building images. With the pathos, humor and the prejudices of his time each artist caricatures the personalities and events that form our culture. Paul Revere, William Charles, and James Gillray satirized the vents of the Revolution and the War of 1812. David Claypool Johnston earned the title of the "American Cruikshank" with his devastating caricatures of "King" Andrew Jackson and his administration, and Southern cartoonists vented their wrath on Abraham Lincoln as the Civil War raged. Artists readily identified or created symbols for each era as cartoons became a widely-distributed art of the people. America was first symbolized as a naïve Indian or the virginal Columbia. The American Eagle was employed to represent the country after it was adopted as the official emblem on the Great Seal. The most famous symbol of the United States, however, is Uncle Sam, best personified by James Montgomery Flagg during World War I. In each decade cartoonists demonstrate their ability to capture the essence of an age in a caricature--Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, et al. The Image of America demonstrates the firm relationship between the events of history and contemporary art forms.--Jacket flap.

Examines wartime political cartoons--with particular emphasis on the works of James Montgomery Flagg, Dr. Seuss, Ollie Harrington, and Ann Telnaes--to examine how, when, and why graphic caricatures serve to illuminate the US national character.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, the Southwestern frontier moved from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, through Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, to Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. Using a variety of styles and subjects, humorists in the frontier states of the Southwest wrote tall tales and humorous stories that made use of dialect and emphasized cruelty, violence, and depravity, in rebellion against the sentimental morality of conventional literature. Such tales flourished from 1835 through 1861 and helped buffer the pioneers during their everyday hardships. The humorists' stories, though exaggerated, were often rooted in the real characters and incidents of the frontier and as such serve as a social history of the period. Many of these stories were originally published in local newspapers and reprinted in William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times. Although the popularity of this type of humor died out with the beginning of the Civil War, its influences can be seen in the works of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Wolfe. The bibliography lists works about Southwest humor in general and by and about nine major humorists including David Crockett, Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Washington Harris, Johnson Jones Hooper, Henry Clay Lewis, Augustus Baldwin Longstreeet, Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, William Tappan Thompson, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. These two main sections are supplemented by author and general subject indices. As the first book-length bibliography in this field, Humor of the Old Southwest will make a useful tool in academic libraries and will find a place in collections of folklore, American literature, and humor.