Looking for some fun reading for this weekend? Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America is currently 57% off at Amazon! #comics #herblock #politicalcartoons #comicsstudies #postwar #editorialillustration #editorialcartoon #editorialcartooning #americanstudies #journalismhistory

Looking for a contractor to design an online portal for #digitalhumanities project. Prior experience with TEI & IIIF is a plus. We want an accessible, interactive interface for a collection of public facing texts and images. Message me for further details, incl. budget.

Drawing Liberalism is now officially out and to help publicize the launch I answered some questions about the book for the UVA Press.

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/author-corner/authors-corner-with-simon-appleford-author-of-drawing-liberalism/

#comicsstudies #herblock

I'm really proud of this work and I hope you'll consider reading it. If you do, please let me know as I'd love to hear what others think of it!

#comicsstudies

With its support for the liberal agenda, Herblock’s work affords a unique lens through which to interpret and understand the shifts and contours of 20th-century American political culture, from the postwar period through the civil rights era into the Nixon presidency.

Block was also fully committed to the idea that a healthy democracy relied on a free and vibrant press that would help protect against those who would seek to undermine American values for their own benefit. With staff cartoonists especially vulnerable to the wave of cost-cutting afflicting so many newspapers over the last decade, Block’s cartoons remind us how powerful a tool they can be in holding those in power accountable to the public.

If you’re interested in seeing examples of his cartoons, well buy my book (it reproduces forty cartoons!), but his original art and papers are located at the Library of Congress, which hosts a permanent revolving exhibit of his work https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/herblock-gallery/herblock-looks-at-1972.html

Block is arguably most famous for the numerous cartoons he drew responding to what he saw as the smear politics of two Republicans: Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon.

Long an opponent of the methods used by various congressional committees to root out alleged communists from American life, his 1950 responding to the tactics of Joseph McCarthy popularized the word McCarthyism as a short-hand for political witch hunts.

His depiction of Nixon as a sewer-dwelling thug complete with heavy five o’clock shadow and drooping jowls became so inseparable in people’s minds with the real Nixon that for much of his political career he was obsessed with “erasing the Herblock image.”

But there was much more to Block’s work than standing against these two politicians and Drawing Liberalism also explores how he engaged with issues such as civil rights and civil liberties, the emergence of a new conservative movement, and the election of 1968.

#comicsstudies

We’re less than a week away from the official publication date of Drawing Liberalism and preorders are starting to arrive, so I thought I’d write a short thread about my book.

Drawing Liberalism is a book about several things, but at its heart is the work of #Herblock. For those unfamiliar with his career, Herbert Block was the Washington Post’s political cartoonist from 1946 until his death in 2001. His work for the Post covered almost every major issue of the second half of the 20th century. Among many other topics, he regularly drew about issues including the U.S. economy, civil rights, environmentalism, the influence of special interests, corruption, and gun control.

Like many Americans of his generation, Block was a proponent of postwar liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that believed a benevolent but activist and expansive federal government could shape society by keeping in check the worst excesses of capitalism.

#comicsstudies #herblock #politicalcartoon

Delighted to have a chapter (co-authored with the incomparable Jen Guiliano) in "Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned," which is out now in #openaccess. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003301097-21/transitioning-synchronous-workshops-asynchronous-digital-resources-jennifer-guiliano-simon-appleford?context=ubx&refId=345b24d7-fabf-4f81-9448-59d7ef9abf69

We discuss how we turned a series of week-long workshops focused around project management in the digital humanities into an online resource, DevDH.org, that supports asynchronous training.

This morning's #digitalhumanitiesbaking is a coffee cake for a birthday party tomorrow. I didn't get very many in-process shots, so you'll just get the end product. While baking I listened to a number of the lectures on https://devdh.org/.

And a special note - all the resources are available as audio files. Would that more DH materials were available in formats conducive to listening.

I was listening to the talks on designing research questions, literature reviews, and first steps in planning a digital project. The site is really invaluable for teachers and researchers alike.

I regularly assign devdh.org to students interested in project management. In Praxis right now we're doing a unit on digital project design and research infrastructure, so we gave the site to our students as a resource. But I haven't actually listened to all that many of the lectures (there are so many! a real trove of riches). So I thought I would check them out today.

@drreznicek Yes! Let's plan on it sooner than later!

@drreznicek Thanks Matt!

Was away between Christmas and New Year but came home to find a late Christmas gift from the University of Virginia Press. It’s somewhat surreal holding a physical copy but the Press has done an amazing job with it! #herblock #ComicsStudies

Just getting things back together after the great hcommons crash of 2022, so let's try these #introductions again ...

I'm an Associate Professor of History at Creighton University. My book Drawing Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America will be published in February 2023 from the University of Virginia Press (https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5814/). It explores Herblock's political and social impact and argues that his cartoons played a central role in shaping, propagandizing, and defending the ideals of postwar liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that dominated American politics and culture after WW2. #comicstudies

What better way of #introduction than by announcing that my book Drawing Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America will be published in early 2023 from the University of Virginia Press. It explores Herblock's political and social impact and argues that his cartoons played a central role in shaping, propagandizing, and defending the ideals of postwar liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that dominated American politics and culture after World War 2. #ComicsStudies