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231. Jeffrey Croteau, “From Blind Man’s Bluff to the Poor Blind Candidate: David Claypoole Johnston’s Anti-Masonic Illustrations for New England Almanacs,” Vol. 37, No. 2 (Autumn 2012), 2-21, 13 illus.

This article offers new insights into political satire of the Jackson era. In his study of David Claypoole Johnston’s anti-Masonic illustrations for New England almanacs published in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Jeffrey Croteau shows how these prints were motivated by the same politics that fueled Johnston’s caricatures of Andrew Jackson. Croteau addresses these prints “within the context of the political climate from which they emerged” and analyses Johnston’s use of Masonic symbols and ritual in constructing politically-motivated satire.

232. Allison Lange, “Picturing Tradition: Images of Martha Washington in Antebellum Politics,” Vol. 37, No. 2 (Autumn 2012), 22-39, 15 illus.

The growing strength of the woman’s rights and woman suffrage movements from the 1840s through the 1860s challenged views of gender behavior held by the majority of Americans. Allison Lange explores the ways in which First Lady Martha Washington was promoted by traditionalists as a foil to the woman’s rights activists. Portraits and scenes from the life of Martha Washington were marketed to the public as a correct model for political womanhood.  Lange references the interpretation of the first lady as presented by Rufus Griswold in The Republican Court, or, American Society in the Days of Washington (1855), and shows how popular prints perpetuated his traditionalist principles in visual form.

233. David Gilmore Wright, “Emily Kelley Moran: Philadelphia’s Ground-Breaking Female Painter-Etcher,” Vol. 37, No. 2 (Autumn 2012), 40-54, 10 illus.

David. G. Wright has undertaken the delicate task of recovering the life and art of Emily Kelley Moran (1841-1903). Overshadowed by her more famous in-laws Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran, her husband Peter Moran, and her brother-in-law Stephen James Ferris, Emily Moran was in the vanguard of women taking up the etching needle. She actively practiced her art and participated in etching exhibitions throughout the 1870s and 1880s. With scant primary source material and almost no personal recollections, Wright has painstakingly developed her story, making the most of the evidence, codifying her surviving etchings, confining speculation to the notes.  Contains a list of nineteen documented titles of the etched plates of Emily Kelley Moran.