📜 Liberty and the Republic
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Culture, faith and the arts

🖋️ Art and Politics in the 20th and 21st Centuries

How editorial art, line drawings and political cartoons, photography, modern art and music have shaped politics and been shaped by it from 1900 to today: the cartoonists from Kirby and Herblock to Telnaes, the posters and murals, the photographs that moved laws and ended wars, the fights over Guernica, the NEA and the flag, the protest songs and the campaign-song lawsuits, and how to read, use and report on political art now.

10 lessons · about 10 hours ·

Start lesson 1

  1. 1Why Art and Politics Meet: Persuasion, Propaganda and WitnessThe frame for the whole course: three jobs political art does, Orwell and Benjamin on why art is never neutral, the 1917 federal poster machine, how the Supreme Court came to protect parody, flag burning and arts funding, where the protection stops, and a dated table of the century's movements and media.45 min
  2. 2The Political Cartoon, 1900 to 1945: Puck, Berryman, The Masses and Willie and JoeThe newspaper cartoon in its first golden age: Puck and Judge, Homer Davenport's Mark Hanna, Clifford Berryman and the Mississippi bear, the first Pulitzers for editorial cartooning (Rollin Kirby, 1922) with a full table to 1945, the Espionage Act case against The Masses and its two hung juries, Dr. Seuss at PM, David Low, and Bill Mauldin's run-in with General Patton, plus a method for reading a cartoon.55 min
  3. 3The Political Cartoon, 1945 to 2000: Herblock, Mauldin, Conrad, Trudeau and the Syndicated AgeHerblock and the word McCarthyism (March 29, 1950), Nixon in cartoons, the Pulitzer winners from 1945 to 2000 in a full table, Mauldin's 1959 prize and 1963 Lincoln cartoon, Paul Conrad, Pat Oliphant, Jeff MacNelly, Jules Feiffer, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and the 1973 Mitchell strip, Signe Wilkinson and Ann Telnaes, and what the Herb Block Foundation's figures say about the economics of the job.55 min
  4. 4The Political Cartoon in the 21st Century: Lost Jobs, Violence, Firings and the MemeHow the staff cartoonist job shrank, what happened after the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of September 30, 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo attack of January 7, 2015, why The New York Times dropped cartoons in 2019, the Rob Rogers and Ann Telnaes departures, the Pulitzer category rename, and where memes, AI images and the law of parody and copyright fit.60 min
  5. 5Posters, Murals and the Drawn Line: From Uncle Sam to HopeThe drawn line outside the daily cartoon: Flagg's Uncle Sam and Christy's Navy poster, Rockwell's Four Freedoms and the war bond tour, the WPA poster divisions, Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera's destroyed Rockefeller Center mural, Emory Douglas, the Guerrilla Girls, Shepard Fairey's Hope poster and the AP dispute, and Banksy, with how to trace a poster's print history and check its public domain status.60 min
  6. 6Photography and Politics: The Camera as Witness and as WeaponLewis Hine's child labor pictures and the forty-year road from Keating-Owen (1916) through Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) to the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) and United States v. Darby (1941); the Resettlement Administration, FSA and OWI file of about 175,000 negatives, Migrant Mother and the retouched thumb, Rothstein's skull, Parks's charwoman; Capa's Falling Soldier and the Espejo evidence; Rosenthal at Suribachi and how the staging rumor started; the Zapruder film and the $16 million award; Adams, Ut and Filo; the 2025 World Press Photo suspension of Ut's credit; Abu Ghraib, Alan Kurdi and the George Floyd recording; manipulation from Stalin's retouchers to the 1994 Time cover and the 2023 Pentagon fake; and how to check a photograph's provenance.70 min
  7. 7Modern Art and the State: Patrons, Censors and the Public PurseHow governments have paid for, praised, banned and covered up modern art: Guernica (painted May 1 to June 4, 1937; MoMA custody; Spain in 1981; the UN woven copy covered on February 5, 2003), the Nazi Degenerate Art show of 1937, Soviet Socialist Realism, the Federal Art Project, the dispute over the CIA and Abstract Expressionism, the 1989 to 1990 NEA fights (Serrano, Mapplethorpe, the Cincinnati acquittal of October 5, 1990), Dread Scott and the flag cases, NEA v. Finley (1998), the Brooklyn Museum Sensation case (1999), Ai Weiwei, the removal of Confederate monuments and the 2025 to 2026 federal actions on the Smithsonian.70 min
  8. 8Music and Politics, 1900 to 1970: Union Songs, Blacklists and Freedom SongsJoe Hill and the IWW songbook, Woody Guthrie's 1940 song and its omitted verses, Strange Fruit, Paul Robeson at Peekskill and in the passport case, Pete Seeger's 1955 testimony and the 1962 reversal, We Shall Overcome and its 2018 public domain settlement, Mississippi Goddam and A Change Is Gonna Come, Merle Haggard's Okie from Muskogee, and the effort to deport John Lennon.60 min
  9. 9Music and Politics, 1970 to Today: Hearings, Labels, Lawsuits and Campaign SongsReagan and Springsteen in September 1984, the Frankenchrist obscenity trial, Live Aid, the September 19, 1985 Senate hearing on record labeling, the FBI letter to N.W.A's distributor, Luke Records v. Navarro and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, the Dixie Chicks in 2003, Kendrick Lamar's 2018 Pulitzer, the campaign song disputes from Browne v. McCain to the 2024 rulings, and the 2023 and 2025 country and Super Bowl episodes.65 min
  10. 10Reading, Using and Reporting on Political Art: Method, Copyright and ArchivesA structured method for analyzing a cartoon, poster, photograph, artwork or song, with a worked example of a public domain Berryman cartoon; the four fair use factors and the cases that shaped them (Hustler v. Falwell, Campbell, Fairey and the AP, Warhol v. Goldsmith); the public domain cutoff and government works; archives and how to search them; AI generated political images and Idaho's FAIR Elections Act; and verified figures with a 1900 to 2026 timeline.70 min