Puzzled by the Past

Solution to April 1999 Puzzle

All three images are engravings from contemporary illustrated newspapers showing scenes from the 1863 New York Draft Riot.

Illustrated London News, August 8, 1863	Pictures of news events sometimes tell us more about the point of view of a newspaper's publisher, or editor, or artist, or photographer, or readership than about the events themselves. All pictorial newspapers in 1863 published pictures showing attacks on African Americans that occurred during the Draft Riot. But the ways rioters were portrayed varied.

This second picture, from Harper's Weekly, shows rioters looting a Second Avenue drugstore. The Weekly, which supported the Republican party and espoused nativist (anti-immigrant) sentiments, caricatured rioters to emphasize their Irish ethnicity and brutality.

Harper's Weekly, August 1, 1863

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, August 1, 1863

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper also used Irish caricatures in its pictorial news coverage of the Draft Riot - but not consistently. This picture, from Leslie's, shows an orderly and uncaricatured "group of rioters marching down Avenue A." Leslie's readers included many Irish Catholic New Yorkers.

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