4a. Images before photography

The image before photography

  1. Altamira bison cave painting

    Neanderthal cave art goes back 64,000 years. BBC. Feb. 23, 2018.

  2. Prehistoric flute dates European pre-history to 42,000 years.
  3. The story of the Altamira Cave.
  4. Finding Altamira — A feature film starring Antonio Banderas, about the cave paintings in Altamira.
  5. Paintings on cave walls in northwestern Spain are far older than previously thought — some of them more than 40,000 years old.
  6. Earliest imaginative cave paintings date back 43,000 years. New York Times. Dec. 11, 2019
  7. Tumblr pages on Medieval illuminations.
  8. Currier & Ives prints  of everyday life in the 19th century.
  9. Magic lantern slides at the Victoria & Albert museum
  10. Hokusai and the wave that swept the world, BBC, Aug 2016.

History of Cartoons

Editorializing against the British slave trade in this print from the late 1700s.

  1. Fifteen historic cartoons that changed the world.  Buzzfeed article, May 2013. From a book by Victor Navasky, The Art of Controversy.
  2. The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone is a comic book history of the media.
  3. Drawing Protest, 1525 – 1970. How protest was visualized through the centuries. Melton Prior Institute, Düsseldorf. (Excellent site)
  4. Political cartoons of Thomas Nast.  Also, more Nast cartoons about the election of 1872 and Horace Greeley
  5. Anti-immigrant cartoon from Puck magazine.
  6. Political Cartoons in US history — (Library of Congress)
  7. Radical posters and editorial cartoons of the 19th and 20th century – Open Culture.
  8. A brief history of political cartoons — (UVa)
  9. The Opper Project – Using cartoons to teach American history  (Ohio State University )

Political Cartoons

  1. Political cartoon collection, Library company of Philadelphia. And Norman Rockwell Museum collection.
  2. Was Belle Starr the female Jesse James? (See 1886 engraving to the right) Starr was an obscure figure for most of her life, but her story of escaping an unjust jail sentence was picked up by the National Police Gazette and she rode into western legend.  Stuff you missed in history class podcast about Starr is worth checking out.
  3. Tintin, a 1930s – 60s cartoon series depicting an intrepid journalist and his dog, was the subject of a civil trial over hate speech in Belgium in 2010-12.  The courts decided that the cartoon was not an example of the kind of hate speech that was intended to create a hostile, degrading or humiliating environment for the kind of people it depicted. However, some of the cartoons, especially Tintin in the Congo, are clearly racist in nature. Also see this US Slave blog.
  4. Liberty Suspended, George Cruikshank, 1817
  5. Cartoons reflect the dangers of giving women the vote!  UK, 1900 – 1920.

    Liberty Suspended

  6.  “Ding” Darling  – American political cartoonist.
  7. Cartoons of the Velvet Revolution (Czech Republic, 1989)
  8. Book on Rube Goldberg cartoons published.
  9. Life in London — David Brewer (Ohio State) great essay on depictions of life in 18th & 19th century London  through  illustrations by William Hogarth and  Pierce Egan.   Prof. Brewer’s paper is entitled: “Romantic Fandom — The Moment of Tom and Jerry” (‘when fistycuffs were the fashion’)”.  
  10. Julian Bond’s 1967 comic book opposing the US war in Vietnam.   Bond was the civil rights activist who had to be elected three times in order for the George courts to tell the legislature to give him his elected seat.

Cartoons are still controversial

  1. Why are political cartoons incendiary?  Victor Navasky, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2011.
  2. Cartooning and plagiarism, Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2011.  Also see this Island Press take on another plagiarism case.
  3. Editorial cartoon in Farm News drew the ire of big ag corporations and got the cartoonist fired in May, 2016.
  4. Canadian cartoonist fired for drawing an image of Donald Trump trying to “play through” the deaths of migrants on the southern US border.