RRCHNM Logo
This is an archived copy of History Matters, provided by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. To explore this content in a new interface, visit Who Built America?.
home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | references
talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Solution to April 1999 Puzzle

All three images are engravings from contemporary illustrated newspapers showing scenes from the 1863 New York Draft Riot.

 

An engraving of a bustling street crowd gathered among trees and rowhouses, with men standing on a barrel and climbing a tree to address or watch the gathering.
Illustrated London News, August 8, 1863
 Pictures of news events sometimes tell us more about the point of view of a newspaper's publisher, or editor, or artist, or photographer, or readership than about the events themselves. All pictorial newspapers in 1863 published pictures showing attacks on African Americans that occurred during the Draft Riot. But the ways rioters were portrayed varied.

This second picture, from Harper's Weekly, shows rioters looting a Second Avenue drugstore. The Weekly, which supported the Republican party and espoused nativist (anti-immigrant) sentiments, caricatured rioters to emphasize their Irish ethnicity and brutality. A 19th-century engraving of a chaotic street scene where a crowd attacks a building, smashing windows and hurling objects while a man flees down steps carrying papers.
Harper's Weekly, August 1, 1863

Engraving of a well-dressed man in a top hat being marched down a street by armed guards, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers in Victorian-era dress.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, August 1, 1863		Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper also used Irish caricatures in its pictorial news coverage of the Draft Riot - but not consistently. This picture, from Leslie's, shows an orderly and uncaricatured "group of rioters marching down Avenue A." Leslie's readers included many Irish Catholic New Yorkers.

Return to Puzzle Archive