For decades before the civil war the country was already in two about the issue of slavery. For most of the northern states, slavery had been illegal for 60 years before the start of the civil war in 1861 and the population saw slavery immoral and against their being to help continue, even if the federal government turned a blind eye to the exploitation in the south. In 1850 a slave state majority congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This piece of legislation made northern states more responsible help find, report, and return run away slaves. I couldn’t find out much about this print. Its know that it was a lithograph that was know to be very skillful at the time and added to the library of congress. It is signed Th. Kaufmann and was published by Hoff & Bloede in October of 1850. The depiction is fairly gruesome. It shows six white men with muskets chasing and firing upon four black men with one falling over due to being shot and another grasping the back of his head presumably from the same fate. For a piece of propaganda from the time it is special in the avoidance of using stereotypes or heavy-handed symbolism. This relies heavily on a very straight forward appeal to emotion from the audience. I think this piece almost shouts “Do you see this death on your hands? Are you okay with it?” Below the image it has two passages, one from the bible referring to helping escaped servants from abusive master and the other is the famous “We hold that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” line from the declaration of independence. These simple quotes are testimonials to the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The First World War was, as the name suggests, the first war where major alliances and many imperial territories caused much of the world to become embroiled in war with the epicenter being Germany and Austria-Hungary’s expansion in Europe. The war started in 1914 and was mostly contained in central Europe until over half way into the war. In the beginning of 1917, the United States joined the war on the side of the Allies while the tides of the war were already turning against the Central Powers. This cartoon was made one and a half years later at the end of World War I for the LIFE Magazine in the United States. Because of the late entry and quick subsequent victory, the public and the press of the US took undue credit for the allied victory and this political cartoon is an extension of that. It depicts a figure of lady democracy leaning over from the other side of the world to crush a depiction of a German leader with the tag “Militarism”. It was made by Charles Dana Gibson using a fairly new process using chemically etched zinc printing plates made by scratching away a wax coating then putting in an acid to strip away a smooth zinc layer and printing in a method like lithography. This uses over half of the list of propaganda techniques including Pinpointing the Enemy as very stereotypical depictions of the German army, Euphemism of the war and death instead of more direct depictions, selectively omitting the efforts of every other Allied nation, Glittering Generalizations of the might of Democracy, Transferring the might of this figure to democracy and the frailty to Militarism, and finally fear tactics against a now losing opponent that was then yet to surrender. This was for an American public who just over a year before joined a war on the other side of the earth and for the first time showed that the US should play on a global scale. Germany was still yet to surrender but this was to show the average us citizen our own might.