Although modern-day political parties have embraced their animal symbols, there were many instances of the symbols being used as a form of ridicule, especially by artists who created political cartoons. conduct internet research to find one historical political cartoon representation of the democratic party and one historical political cartoon representation of the republican party. after selecting the two different cartoons, you will write a paragraph addressing the following:

discuss your interpretation of each of the cartoons. what do you think the artist’s message was?
would it be a good idea to use these cartoons as sources for a factual research paper? why or why not?
do you see bias in the cartoons? if so, explain. or, can these cartoons be considered objective, unbiased images?
label each reference to the sources with proper citation: any direct quotations or references should be followed by the last name of the artist and the year of publication, in parentheses. example: (jones 2015).
at the conclusion of your paragraph, properly cite both of your sources, following the guidelines of image citation. click here to access the image use and citation guide for reference.

The Democratic Party’s donkey and the Republican Party’s elephant have been on the political scene since the 19th century. The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. Jackson went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams and serve as America’s first Democratic president. In the 1870s, influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party.

The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House. An image of an elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in at least one political cartoon and a newspaper illustration during the Civil War (when “seeing the elephant” was an expression used by soldiers to mean experiencing combat), but the pachyderm didn’t start to take hold as a GOP symbol until Thomas Nast, who’s considered the father of the modern political cartoon, used it in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon. Titled “The Third-Term Panic,” Nast’s drawing mocked the New York Herald, which had been critical of President Ulysses Grant’s rumored bid for a third term, and portrayed various interest groups as animals, including an elephant labeled “the Republican vote,” which was shown standing at the edge of a pit. Nast employed the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons during the 1870s, and by 1880 other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party.

the confederate at bull run