Essential Question: To what extent are political cartoons an effective means to promote a political position or ideal?
This lesson is designed to help students understand how to break down the symbolism, deeper meaning, and most importantly perspective of a political cartoon using the American Revolution as the context. The students will be guided through six political cartoons from both Patriot and Loyalist perspectives during the American Revolution, and will attempt to distinguish the importance or meaning of (already identified and pointed out) symbolism along with how that influences their opinion on what the author’s perspective might be. Without structure and guidance from the instructor, however, the images might be too challenging for students to analyze, which is why it is important to point out important symbolism/meaning in the image and have students think critically on how to interpret a deeper meaning from the cartoons.
(I had a plan for verbally walking through the images, but for this post I will transcribe what I planned on explaining verbally into a written paragraph for each image ASAP!)