Question 1: Briefly describe a minimum of TWO factors that one must consider when using newspaper articles as historical evidence.
Question 2: List TWO examples of how working-class urban residents found relief from the pressures of city life? What were some popular past-times?
Question 3: After evaluating the photograph by Jacob Riis (similar to what you viewed within Cogbooks), respond to the following questions:
- What are the concrete details portrayed in the photograph?
- What story do you think the photographer was trying to tell with this image?
- Finally, what are the potential limitations of the photograph? What might be left out of the frame? How authentic was the scene?
Question 4: In your own words and in using specific examples, describe ways that writers, photographers, and visual artists began to embrace more realistic subjects in their work starting in the late nineteenth century. What were they responding to? (There is no minimum word count, but be sure to fully develop your response and proof read before submitting.)
Question 5: After evaluating the image above (similar to what you viewed within Cogbooks), respond to the following questions:
- Can you describe what is happening in this Gilded age-era political cartoon?
- Does it make any use of metaphors, symbols, irony, stereotypes, or caricatures?
- What message do you think it conveys?
- What does it tell us about cultural assumptions or prevailing attitudes of its time?