Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828

Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828
A book talk by Dr. Allison M. Stagg

October 20, 2023
1:30pm ET
Virtual Event | Free

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists. This book presents all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years between 1789 and 1828. It examines the caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Prints of a New Kind fills a large void in early American scholarship, one that has escaped through art historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context. Dr. Allison M. Stagg was the 2017-2018 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture Fellow and this book talk will focus on presenting some of the caricature and ephemeral objects from the Library Company’s collection that are included in Prints of a New Kind.

Dr. Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century American and British visual culture. She received her PhD from University College London and her post-doctoral research has been supported by grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She has published widely on the subject of American historical caricature, with recent articles in Print Quarterly and Imprint: The Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society. She was previously the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin and is currently a research associate in the Department of Architectural and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.

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Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

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