Conceived in Liberty: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations in the Wartime US, 1812-1918

The Newberry Library Trienens Galleries: The American Revolution and the founding documents of the United States placed liberty at the center of the new nation’s identity. But what it meant to dedicate a country to liberty was immediately contested and continues to be contested to this day. Who could claim the Declaration’s “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? For whom were the Constitution’s “Blessings of Liberty” to be secured? What, if anything, justifies limitations on human liberty, and what does a dedication to liberty demand of us?

Visual artists living through wartime in the US left behind a record of this tension at the core of the nation’s purpose and identity. They cheered, critiqued, and satirized the country’s commitment to liberty in magazine illustrations, caricatures, editorial cartoons, sheet music covers, broadsides, and posters. Whether patriotic or dissenting, produced for the masses or only a few, these images reveal the diverse, inspiring, and contradictory ways that liberty has been conceived and realized by the people of the United States.

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