The Norwegian art of rosemaling. Rosemaling is an art style preserved thanks in part to 19th century immigration from Norway’s farming communities to those of Wisconsin. Since that journey, rosemaling has worked its way into the identity of the state.

Photographers covered the Civil War, following the Union Army in wagons that served as traveling darkrooms. Their equipment was bulky and the exposures had to be long, so they could not take action photographs during battle. But photography was graphic; this picture taken on the morning of July 4th, 1863 after three days of heavy fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg, showed the northern public that dying in battle lacked the gallantry often represented in paintings and prints.

Labor activism during the 1930s had an impact on U.S. popular culture, especially film--both on screen and behind the camera. The Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933 and In 1941 trade union organizing reached the workplace where some of the nation's favorite fantasies were produced. After Walt Disney fired union organizers on his art staff, his studio cartoonists went on strike. This cartoon from a newspaper report indicates how Disney strikers brought new skills to labor organizing. "There are mighty few labor disputes," the caption states, "in which just about every striker can make his own picket signs. Consequently, the signs are bright and lively . . . attracting the passerby and winning friends for the Screen Cartoon Guild."

In 1919, Americans ratified the 18th amendment to the Constitution, making it illegal to manufacture, sell, transport, import, or export drinking alcohol. Prohibition, as it was popularly known, proved impossible to enforce, as tens of millions of normally law-abiding Americans either broke the law or abetted those who did. Although the consumption of alcohol did decline, opponents of Prohibition argued that it engendered crime, corruption, and a disregard for law. Organized crime flourished around the profits to be made from selling illegal alcohol, and politicians and police were bought off wholesale. Bribery and corruption, although not always alcohol related, reached into President Harding's cabinetand then onto the front page. This 1926 cartoon by Clive Weed in the satirical weekly Judge comments on the escalation of governmental corruption during Prohibition.

Planters romanticized life on the plantation, often representing themselves as stern but loving parents who had to look after their slaves, who were depicted as childlike and in need of disciplined guidance. The plantation as the perfect extended family was a common theme of pro-slavery prints both before and after the Civil War. This postwar lithograph by the popular firm of Currier and Ives portrayed the slave quarters as a carefree world, basking in the glow of the planter's benevolence. In reality, of course, the harsh life of a slave bore little resemblance to this romanticized image.

A week after his April, 1917, declaration of war on Germany, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a propaganda agency that used sophisticated mass-marketing techniques to sell the war and the sacrifices it would entail to a wary American public. The CPI distributed 75 million pamphlets, placed magazine ads, produced films, and sent out 75,000 speakers to give short, pro-war speeches. As part of this war mobilization effort, the government also relied on the power of effective, if often fantastic, imagery to shape public opinion. Even though most illustrators and editorial cartoonists eagerly produced pro-war work, the government instituted a Bureau of Cartoons, which issued a weekly Bulletin for Cartoonists. The bulletin included suggestions about appropriately patriotic themes and, in some cases, instructions for specific pictures. This dramatically illustrated poster from 1918 urged Americans to purchase Liberty Bonds.

As the depression of the 1870s deepened, demonstrations by unemployed workers took place all over the country. Workers and their allies demanding relief and job programs often were met with official violenceand were treated with hostility by the nation's press. On January 13, 1874 a workers' demonstration in Tompkins Square in New York City was broken up when mounted police moved in, beating demonstrators with clubs.

By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization founded in 1909 to advocate for political and social equality for African Americans, had 91,000 thousand members. From its earliest years, the NAACP lobbied Congress to pass a federal law against lynching, the violent and public murder of African Americans still carried out by mobs in many southern states in the early twentieth century (and indeed into the 1950s). During November, 1922, the NAACP ran this full-page advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers, pressing for passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill. Passed in the House of Representatives by a two-to-one majority, the anti-lynching bill was subsequently filibustered and defeated in the U.S. Senate. Despite the NAACP's vigorous efforts through the 1930s and the introduction of several subsequent anti-lynching bills, the U.S. Congress never outlawed lynching.

Northerners who expected a swift victory were convinced otherwise by the Union defeat at Bull Run on July 21, 1861, shown in this sketch by Illustrated London News special artist" Frank Vizetelly. Northern illustrated newspapers dispatched "special artists" to cover the war. These artists' sketches

By 1890, 200,000 Chinese immigrants, mostly men, lived in the United States, usually working under harsh and dangerous conditions. Chinese immigrants faced hostility that sometimes spilled over into violence. In 1882 Congress, responding to the demands of white workers, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely restricted immigration by Chinese into the U.S. San Francisco's Chinese community was the largest in the nation in 1890, with 25,833 people. Arnold Genthe's turn-of-the-century photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown provide information about the Chinese community, but his characterizations often convey a distorted and ominous message. Despite its title, this photograph of Ross Alley, taken some time around the Chinese New Year holiday, is significant for depicting the unusual daytime congestion resulting from the seasonal unemployment of many Chinatown workers after the holiday.