Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Join, or DieJoin, or DieBenjamin Franklin's woodcut of a snake cut into pieces, each piece labeled with the initials of a colony or region, ran in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754, as war with France over the Ohio Valley loomed and he pressed the case for a colonial union at the Albany Congress. Its genius is how…0
  2. 2The Plumb-pudding in dangerThe Plumb-pudding in dangerJames Gillray's etching, published by Hannah Humphrey in February 1805, seats William Pitt and Napoleon at a dinner table, each carving a slice from a pudding that represents the world. It skewers the hope, then being floated, that Britain and France might settle down together, and history bore it…0
  3. 3Elkanah TisdaleElkanah TisdaleThe Gerry-Mander, Boston Gazette, March 26, 1812 Elkanah Tisdale turned a Massachusetts electoral map into a winged, clawed monster, mocking the state senate districts redrawn for the Democratic-Republican Party and signed into law by Governor Elbridge Gerry. Nobody knows who coined the name, but…0
  4. 4Honoré DaumierHonoré DaumierBorn 26 Feb 1808Gargantua, lithograph for La Caricature, December 1831 The young Honoré Daumier drew King Louis-Philippe as Rabelais's insatiable giant, enthroned and gulping down bags of coins hauled up a ramp to his mouth by tiny laborers. The French state took the joke personally. Daumier and his publisher…0
  5. 5Thomas NastThomas NastBorn 26 Sept 1840Who Stole the People's Money?, Harper's Weekly, 1871 Thomas Nast drew Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall circle standing in a ring, facing outward and passing the blame around, a single image that summed up a whole city's corruption for readers who would never follow the accounts. It belongs to the…0
  6. 6The Bosses of the SenateThe Bosses of the SenateJoseph Keppler's color lithograph for Puck, January 23, 1889, fills the back of the Senate chamber with towering, top-hatted moneybags, each one a trust, looming over the small senators at their desks while the public gallery's entrance stands shut. It is the Gilded Age in one picture, and it has…0
  7. 7Dropping the PilotDropping the PilotJohn Tenniel's Punch cartoon of March 29, 1890 shows Otto von Bismarck, dressed as a ship's pilot, walking down the gangway while the young Kaiser Wilhelm II watches from the deck above. Bismarck had just been dismissed, and Tenniel caught the British worry that Germany, steered by an emperor…0
  8. 8The Rhodes ColossusThe Rhodes ColossusEdward Linley Sambourne's Punch cartoon of December 10, 1892 turns Cecil Rhodes into a modern Colossus of Rhodes, one foot at the Cape and the other at Cairo, stretching a telegraph wire the length of Africa. It was drawn as a comment on Rhodes's Cape-to-Cairo dream, and it works on two levels at…0
  9. 9Clifford K. BerrymanClifford K. BerrymanBorn 2 Apr 1869Drawing the Line in Mississippi, Washington Post, November 1902 On a Mississippi hunting trip that month, Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that had been captured and tied up for him, and Clifford Berryman drew the President turning away from the helpless animal. The cartoon's afterlife…0
  10. 10David Low (cartoonist)David Low (cartoonist)Born 7 Apr 1891Rendezvous, Evening Standard, September 20, 1939 As Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them, David Low drew Hitler and Stalin meeting over the body of a dead Polish soldier, amid smoke and ruins, doffing their hats and greeting each other with the insults each had spent years…0