History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2423 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Image as Argument
The idea
Images in this period carry arguments as directly as text. The eighteen fifty-six cartoon Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Free Soiler shows a Free-Soiler held down by Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan and Cass while an enslaved man is forced into his mouth, crying out about his wife and children, which is Stowe's family argument in a single frame. The eighteen sixty-six Clymer campaign poster shows a caricatured Black man reclining while White men labour, captioned that the Freedman's Bureau is an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the White man.
In practice
One image borrowing a novel's argument, and another inventing the claim that public assistance produces laziness.
Where people slip
Read both for what they assume the viewer already believes, since that is what an image can reveal and a text usually hides. The Clymer poster is northern, printed in a Pennsylvania governor's race, one year after the people it caricatures were freed from a lifetime of unpaid work. Unit 16 entry 2267 carries it. Neither image is reproduced in this course, and both are described in words for that reason.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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