Teach history with these comic collections
December 7, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Today we’ve got two resources dealing with comics for you:
Before political cartoons devolved into crude drawings depicting a guy wearing a T-shirt labeled “TAXES” and smashing something with a hammer, they were elaborately drawn works of art, and often featured more text than some of today’s news stories. The Hale Scrapbook from The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library maintains an extensive collection of editorial cartoons from Gregorian England. Your students will be able to see the issues of the era as seen through the lenses of the doodlers of the day. Some seem kinda weird. Others show that times really haven’t changed that much.
Flash forward a few hundred years and you can show your students some comics of a different period. Comic books aren’t solely the domain of superhuman crime fighters in tight clothing. The U.S. government has often turned to comic books as propaganda tools, delivering messages about everything from the war on drugs to what to do in case an atomic bomb suddenly explodes in your neighborhood. The University of Nebraska Libraries keep a colossal collection of government-issued comics. These books say as much about the era in which they were printed as they do about topics like psychological warfare or nutrition.
University of Nebraska Libraries Digital Collections: Government Comics Collection
Related stuff:
It’s an apostrophe! It’s a semicolon! No, it’s GRAMMARMAN!
Don’t Be Afraid of The Graphic Classroom
Relive the Carnage of American Conflict…With Food
