Wednesday search challenge (5/22/13): Finding political cartoons FROM the day...

[Dan Russell]

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Wednesday search challenge (5/22/13): Finding political cartoons FROM the day...

From Wikimedia.  Political cartoon from 1807. A political cartoon about the US embargo of England and France during the Jefferson administration.

This is the first of our SRS user-contributed challenges.  I'll be using these on and off over the next few months.  The ones sent in were just great, and have me scratching my head trying to solve them!  

Regular Reader StephanieW writes in:  

I am a high school librarian currently working on a Social Studies project with two teachers in my school.   

Students pick an event from U.S. History that happened anywhere from 1945-2010 and they analyze it from a political, social, economical, and historical points of view.  One of their tasks is to find a political cartoon from the period and analyze it as well.    

Recently, two students told me they couldn't find any political cartoons for the concepts "Freedom Riders" or "Lunch Counter Sit Ins."  I was surprised and just thought they couldn't "search" correctly.   

So I started going into Google Images and there is very little out there.  I thought about my word choice (political cartoon, editorial cartoon, cartoon, civil rights cartoon).  I also thought about a specific date range, I also tried black and white, line drawing.   I tried searching through .gov (Library of Congress) and newspapers, all to no avail.  It took a lot of searching to find something that would work.  There were lots of nods of current political cartoons with references to the past, but finding something from the actual time period of these events was difficult!  

Is there something that I am just overlooking?  I'd love to know, as political cartoons are a big piece of our history and capture the sentiments of a time in a very visual way. 

Can you solve Stephanie's question?  Our Search Challenge for today is: 

1.  Can you find a political cartoon about the Freedom Riders that was published during the time of the Freedom Riders?  

2.  What advice can you give young searchers about how to solve this search challenge?  

As usual, please let us know HOW you solved the problem, and please give us an estimate of about how long you took to find an answer.  

Search on!