Use the American Memory Collection to enhance students' understanding of  political cartoons of the Revolutionary War Period and the historical events, individuals, and debates of the time.

Objectives

• learn search methodology to gather information from primary (American Memory Collection) and secondary sources about events and issues pertaining to America's development as a nation between 1754 and 1789
• use these events and issues to identify and place political cartoons of the day in the context of the period
• formulate a hypothesis regarding the purpose and meaning of the cartoons
• analyze the connection between visual image and text
• use primary sources from several American Memory collections to support or refute their hyopthesis
• become aware of and document the evolution of the English language in America through the development of a glossary of terms and phrases from the vernacular found in the primary sources.
• respond to the cartoon from the point of view of someone who lived at the time.

Time Required

Recommended Grade Level

Curriculum Fit

Resources Used

• Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention
• George Washington Papers
• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation
• Archiving Early America
• Let America Speak

Hess, Stephen, and Kaplan, Milton. The Ungentlemanly Art, A History of American Political Cartoons. New York:
Macmillan, 1968.
Founding Fathers, In Their Own Words. edited by T.J. Stiles. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc, 1999.

Procedure

•  Access three cartoons from the Revolutionary War period which are in the American Memory collection

 

Join or Die	The Horse America	Federal Pillars

Print, mount on different colored paper, laminate, and cut into puzzle pieces corresponding to the number of students in cooperative groupings

• Have students assemble puzzle pieces and gather in their group
• Discuss the possible topics of the cartoons and pinpoint with the class the approximate time frame of the cartoons

refer to the Timeline of the American Revolution
• Each group will then be responsible for completing a log containing a hypothesis about the purpose and meaning of their

cartoon and a word map of the "images" in their cartoon
• Using both the timeline and the image vocabulary, students will search the American Memory Collections for their cartoon keeping a log of their activity
• After confirming or revising their hypothesis based on the context of the cartoon and/or outside sources, students will then conduct a search for primary sources within the collection which support their hypothesis.
• Each group will familiarize themselves with the materials on the How to Read a 200 year old document web site and find at least three documents that deal with the topic of their cartoon.
• Printing out the document, students will circle examples of "different" language and attempt to define the word or phrase using context clues.
• Next they will highlight the passages relevant to their topic or theme,
• Using the cartoon as the center of a concept map, students will cut and paste the selected passages around the web
• Each student in the group will then write a letter to the editor of the newspaper where the cartoon appeared, responding to the cartoon in the language of the time. 

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 Extensions

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July 22, 1999