1882 anti-Irish cartoon rstr'nby ~AdamCuerden

Traditional Art / Printing / Lithograph

A political cartoon from 1882, asking the Irish-Americans to kindly shut up about the horrible treatment they got from the English. You know, the whole "let them starve to death, it'd be wrong to help" potato famine thing?

Oh, and also to stop insisting Chinese-Americans need to be thrown out, according to one of the bricks. What the hell?

I think it's an interesting view into the immigrant experience in America, and also because there really were 19th-century lodging houses that actually used this tin-of-sardines approach - [link] - and that's kind of disturbing.

Artist: Joseph Ferdinand Keppler (1838-1894), published in Puck, v. 11, no. 274 (1882 June 7), pp. 220-221. Published by Mayer Merkel & Ottmann, N.Y.

Original, unedited scan was from the Library of Congress. [link] The major challenge was removing the crease down the middle, which took about... 3 hours by itself, plus another hour or two to do the rest of the cleanup.

I suppose I'd best add a bit of an "And that's terrible" disclaimer: Yes, that's a lot of offensive national stereotypes, isn't it? But such stereotyping was part of the immigrant experience, and pretending it didn't exist gives a rather skewed view of it, which distorts history. (Though, ye gods, seriously? The Chinaman has an opium pipe? The 19th century was a different, rather casually offensive place, that's all I can say.)