Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828

with Allison M. Stagg

Tuesday, September 19, 2023, at 7:00 pm ET

Approximately 60 minutes. This hybrid program will be held in person at Antiquarian Hall and livestreamed to a virtual audience on YouTube. Advance registration is required for both. Doors open at 6:30pm.

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In Prints of a New Kind, Dr. Allison M. Stagg details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists in the country’s transformative early years between 1789 and 1828. She examines the caricatures that mocked politicians and events reported in newspapers, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Stagg’s research fills a large void in early American scholarship, one that has escaped through art historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context. During this hybrid program, Stagg will explore the rich and colorful caricature prints of James Akin and William Charles found in the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and British visual culture. She received her PhD from University College London and her post-doctoral research has been supported by grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She has published widely on the subject of historical caricature, with recent articles in Print Quarterly and Imprint: the Journal of American Historical Print Collector’s Society. Stagg was previously the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin and is currently a research associate in the Department of Architectural and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. She held a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in 2009.