Reconstruction Era Visuals Project

Southerners would often label Northerners who came down South to lease plantations, open businesses and schools, etc. as ¨carpetbaggers¨, named so for the cheap bags that many carried with them, usually made from pieces of carpet, stitched together. Oftentimes, they were viewed as being slimy, lower-class opertunists who were off to rip off ¨oppressed¨ White Southerners. However, many were middle- or upper-middle class, and a lot of them were Union soldiers who chose to stay down South after the Civil War. And a lot of them became teachers, out to educate African-Americans who were denied the ability to read and write by slaveowners. So, the carpetbaggers were actually quite the positive force in the post-war South, and their legacy was warped by succeeding generations of racist Southern ¨propaganda¨.

My broadside poster was intended to mimic, to the best of my ability, the broadside posters of the day. This went up to including the word ¨Negro¨ rather than ¨Black¨ or ¨African-American¨, which, although now considered to be offensive, was widely used back then, and continued to be so until roughly the 1960s or so. I also used hyphens for certain words that would have been hyphenated back in the today, such as ¨tonight΅ being spelled ¨to-night¨. I also based the headline about freedmen and the eagle off an anti-immigration and anti-slavery poster from the 1850s, found here:

http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-lincoln%3A33299 (Links to an external site.)

Overall, I think I did a superlative job of imitating the posters, and I hope that I get a good grade on this project.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HHRqUsjD6UwH2NdHmeheJWHsiofD4BkuKoqXnnJ7d5Q/edit