Beyond Words

Integrating Technology: Beyond Words

The Beyond Words project invites people of all ages to identify cartoons, illustrations, photographs, and maps from World War I historical newspaper coverage found in the Chronicling America historic newspaper collections. All data generated will be in the public domain and available to anyone. The three tasks include marking, transcribing, and verifying. Mark: Locate images not…

By th' way, what's that big word?

Analyzing Primary Sources: Reading Cartoons

We often think of cartoons as funny but, in addition to entertaining and amusing us, they can also enlighten, provoke or persuade us. Political or editorial cartoons, in particular, provide subjective viewpoints about current issues and events and the people involved in them. Cartoonists use a variety of techniques—symbolism, exaggeration, irony, analogy and labeling to…

Pride goeth before destruction

Analyzing Primary Sources: Learning from Political Cartoons

Political cartoons, many of which contain both an image and text, are great primary sources to use with students to help them recognize and understand symbolism, perspective, and bias as well as put people, events, issues, and ideas into historical context. The analysis of political cartoons, like other primary source images, Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS). They…