Join, or Die

Benjamin 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 little it needs: three words and a severed body that anyone could read at a glance. The image outlived its original purpose, reappearing in newspapers during the 1765 Stamp Act crisis and as a masthead during the Revolution, when the unity it demanded was turned against Britain rather than France. Start here to see how a single picture can carry an argument further than any editorial.