Chapter 4, April 5th

     The chapter is titled Attacking Municipal Corruption. It starts off explaining how Thomas Nast illustrations in Harper's Weekly attacked William Marcy Tweed, showing off how much authority a political piece of art can bring. I think that even compared to today's news papers, political cartoons are extremely important. It is issues like these that opened the door for the future of artistic expression for elections and politics.

     In the section Heyday of Corruption, it explains how the aftermath of the Civil War caused urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, and created the Gilded Ages. Tweed's history was explained to show why he was such a major part of this movement. The next section was Pictures Confront Politics, which talked about Thomas Nast and how his visual political arts brought something to the table. Focusing more on his Civil War cartoons. The next section was The New York Times Joins the Crusades, which was showing how James B. Taylor stepped in and made sure The New York Times could not speak against Tweed, when Taylor became powerful enough. Help from an Insider, a section talking about James O'Brien's secret campaign against Tweed. Reaching the Masses had the interesting statistic of it being printed 200,00 times in that era, but Harper's Weekly was better at getting there paper out to an audience. The Journalistic Legacy raps up the chapter by giving credit where credit is due. The two papers were both very compelling, brave, and informative to the public.

     I chose this chapter because political cartoons are still very important to politics. It is interesting to show how that started and the drama behind the first few cartoons. A picture is worth a thousand words, until it is about politics, because then it is worth millions.



The image is from web.utk.edu/~glenn//Symbols.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YildL_ilQFY An excerpt from the 1999 Documentary Film on New York by Ric Burns.

March 10th

For the homework I read the Introduction to Mightier Than The Sword. A few key subjects I would like to bring up from the reading is when the Ku Klux Klan was being defeated by the news papers and radio. Rodger Streitmatter also explained how this book would give a good understanding to the American media and American culture through his past education and what he has learned. In chapter 1, great historic writers such as Sam Adams and Thomas Paine were metioned and how their ratical movements through writing that touched upon taxing and other negative subjects from their time. Also the Boston Massacre was explained in some detail to farther explain the era that the chapter was about.
A well known picture of the Boston Massacre. This is used in text books and exams today.