Exploring the Late 1800s through Political Cartoons
The Library of Congress provides hundreds of historical political cartoons through its Cartoon Drawings collection, dating mostly from the late 1800s to early 1900s. What do these cartoons say about that time period?
How to Use
From the dropdown below, select subjects to explore.
The timeline is interactive. Hover over it!
You can browse the image slideshow below the timeline.
* Certain years are overrepresented within the LoC's collection. This option scales the graph by the original dataset, to account for these intrinsic inequalities. However, because certain years will have very few cartoons, this feature MAY SKEW RESULTS.
Related Topics (ranked by concurrence):
All Images:
Methodology
Below are some specific notes about the creation of the project. For a more complete picture of how the project was developed, head over to this website's Github.
This project was created using the Library of Congress's Cartoon Drawings collection. Specifically, the images analyzed were the ones available online and in the Public Domain (meaning before 1923, at the time of this project's creation).
Duplicate cartoons were removed from the collection. The Library of Congress's collection contained cartoons which were clearly identical, and had the exact same author, date of creation, and title. These images I removed computationally so as not to skew the results.
The "subjects" for each image were manually generated by the curators of the Cartoon Drawings collection.
For the purposes of this data visualization, I did not count certain subjects in my analysis. These tended to be terms like "American" or "Cartoon" which did not tell much about the actual image. For a full list of these "blacklisted" terms, see here.
I combined the subject "Hill, David B" with "Hill, David" because these terms represented the exact same set of images.
In the subject selection dropdown, only the subjects with more than 10 occurences are shown.
The events highlighted on the timeline were added by hand. A full list of events can be found here.
Sources and Further Reading
Source code for this project is available on Github.
To view the collection that this project uses, go here.