http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html
Reviewed: November 22, 2003
Mounted: January 12, 2004
By Murney Gerlach
Over the course of the last century, there have been a number of presidential campaigns that
have galvanized the country and led to pathbreaking political changes in how a people selects its President. The campaign of 1896 between the Republican William McKinley and the Democrat William Jennings Bryan riveted the country as the political forces led by Eastern and business minded Republicans, supported by a wealthy political machine, faced off against the populist and
progressive impassioned rhetoric, tinged with an evangelical tone of Democrats, eager to
consider the election on the issue of “gold” or “silver.” This campaign focused on seminal issues
that mirrored the concerns of both the Gilded Age and the Progressive era. The campaign and election was a forerunner of others in the 20th century—the campaign of 1912, between Woodrow Wilson, William Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene V. Debbs; the enormously close battle between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey in 1948; or in 1960, the dawn of televised presidential debates, which made its mark on the popular will in the riveting and close contest between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Presidential campaigns and elections have appealed much to both academic and popular audiences and even more so after the contested and controversial 2000 presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore.
Content and Sections
This website on the 1896 presidential election offers much more than a selection of images of cartoons, excerpts from newspaper clippings, and other evidences of the political culture of the
history of the 1890s. Rebecca Edwards, assistant professor of history at Vassar College, along with Sarah DeFeo, a Vassar student, class of 1999, and students in an American history class - “A House Divided: The United States, 1830-1890” created the site with assistance from advisors on technology, other historians in the field of the Gilded Age, Vassar’s Center for Electronic Learning & Teaching, the Vassar College Library, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, H-Net: History Online, and several other consultants. This project has been used as a learning process for students to explore how to mount and build an active website.
Introduced as “one of the most exciting and complicated” elections in U.S. history, the website on the 1896 presidential election offers a wide range of background stories on the major leaders, parties and platforms, campaign themes, as well as associated links to other references and sources, for instance, U.S. Supreme Court cases. The purpose, to reveal these fascinating sources which have lain buried in archives, has been achieved, and the project has gone a long way “to offer a window into political structures, issues, society, and culture in the United States, just before the turn of the last century.” The whole sense of the project is very encyclopedic in its nature, in that the team working on the website produced historical explanations and descriptions of the full range of actors and leaders, themes, and events in the 1890s. The history supplied consists of basic, fundamental biographical and general descriptions of such topics as American foreign policy, feminism, and economic issues that were part and parcel of American history in the 1890s.
In addition to a major chronology of events in the 1896 election, there are links to other
historical and documentary information, such as lists of journals and newspapers (along with circulation and distribution statistics), as well as sections on the Democratic, Republican and Populist parties. Iconic logos take you to each of these sections, and there are, in addition, pages devoted to leaders, themes of the campaign, and popular culture in the 1890s. Short biographies and descriptions of leaders such as Andrew Carnegie, William R. Hearst, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Lease, are included along with politicians McKinley, Bryan, Grover Cleveland, and Eugene V. Debbs. Themes covered include antisemitism, the currency issue, economic depression, immigration, racial prejudice, sectional interests, strikes and the Supreme Court. Topics of popular culture include bicycles, literary themes, medicine, popular amusements, and images of Uncle Sam. At the end of the website, a bibliography and ideas for “teaching the election of 1896" are introduced and discussed.
The bibliography consists of the standard historical works on the Gilded Age, Populism, Republican and Democratic parties, the campaign of 1896, electoral politics, gender and politics, U.S. foreign policy, and cartoons of the era. The teaching section poses general discussion questions that could be used for teaching popular culture or topics on the 1890s in undergraduate or graduate classes; and there is a general request for additional discussion topics to be sent to a web address at Vassar University. I am not sure how useful these discussion questions might be in probing the issues of the 1890s, and it is not clear that there has been much follow up on the work started by this particular class, in subsequent years. Under the teaching section, there are suggestions for: 1) discussion; 2) writing; 3) further reading; and 4) advanced archival research. Throughout the website there are occasional typos, and some links do not consist of information that they might. For instance, one reference and link to European economic issues does not contain much information on the international bimetallic movement, European monetary conferences, or economic issues associated with the Great Depression of the 1890s, especially in England. There are a number of instances scattered throughout the website where links would not open.
Layout and Technical Issues
The site was designed in 1999 and copyrighted in 2000, but there is not any evidence that it has been updated since that time. Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College, holds the copyright for the website. There is no notice of restrictions on the use of the images or a mechanism by which high resolution copies of hard copies might be obtained. The structure of the site is dense and filled with biographical and historical description of the themes, personalities, and events of the 1890s. There are frequent links in the text to other bibliographical and external websites, and the basic history and understanding of the period is comprehensive and sound. Despite these strengths, at times, the word highlighted as the link does not adequately convey what appears once the link is selected, and it is also a little confusing to go back and forth between links and text.
The layout is straightforward and effective although many of the pages are quite long, consisting of lengthy lists. The “Cartoons & Commentary” and “A Chronology” sections, for example, could be shortened in page length to reduce scrolling by using table cells in a horizontal row. In addition, while there are occasional images to break up the text, there are still large blocks of narrative on many of the pages, making the site a bit uninviting. Complex, table structured, database-driven web pages are common in 2003, but they were not in 1999 when this site was created. That said--in two clicks from the top page a user can view a cartoon illustration, in three clicks an enlargement. “1896" is a relatively small collection of images for which the use of links to reach static pages is appropriate.
There is no explanation of the procedure used to digitize the cartoons or from what collection they were obtained. A typical procedure for making reproductions from line originals might be to scan at 600dpi at 100% for maximum pixel information, then to save as a .gif in order to keep line sharpness. The cartoon thumbnail and enlargements in “1896" are saved as .jpgs, a format better suited for continuous tone photographs. An enlargement saved to the hard disk and printed on copier paper showed considerable compression artifacts inherent in the .jpg file format. It was difficult to read the caption of an 8 x 9.5 inch image. The contrast was good, and the print size usable in a student report. The file sizes for enlargements ranged from a respectable 68k to almost 300k. Some image thumbnails have no accompanying enlargement, and some lead to a “File Not Found” error.
When attempting to open links for the authors of this website, a number of files were unable to be located or were inactive. It is not clear how much work has been done to update and manage this website since it was first introduced as a class project in 1999-2000. Useful web links, which contain valuable insights into the 1890s and the Gilded Age, include that on the McKinley Era produced by Ohio State University; American Memory, developed by the Library of Congress; a journal browsing page, Making of America, from the University of Michigan; Duke University’s Scriptorium; and SUNY Binghampton’s Women and Social Movements in the US, 1830-1930.
Critical Remarks and Conclusion
In many respects, this class project has done a sound job of integrating a discussion of primary topics and themes in late-19th century American history, with a presentation on cultural and popular issues associated with the presidential election of 1896. Perhaps it would have been useful to list other studies of presidential elections, for instance that of 1912 in the midst of the Progressive Era. As far as the standard histories of the 1896 election go, Stanley L. Jones’ The Presidential Election of 1896, published in 1964, is still the conventional history of the campaign.
While it appears that this website has not been updated since 1999-2000, it is apparent that Professor Edwards managed this student project in a very capable fashion. It thus remains a pedagogical model for other classes. In addition, the popular culture, newspaper articles, political cartoons do rescue from the archives the nature of political commentary about the age. Students picked fairly traditional cartoon images to display, but it also seems that it would have been beneficial for there to be greater discussion and interpretations presented on the cartoons themselves - the images, events and themes which are represented in the cartoons. Captions that identified all of the people in the cartoons, for example, would go a long way in helping a visitor to the site understand what the cartoon was trying to convey. But in the final analysis, this website has been a success, even given some of its above-noted technical shortcomings and inactive links or broken links. Late Gilded Age leaders like William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, and William Jennings Bryan; the Populist tone of the age, the urgency and struggling debate over gold and silver, the currency issue, are all well represented and discussed in this website.
Point Assessment for The Presidential Campaign: 1896 - Cartoons and Commentary
(more information on PHRC's rating system is available)
Basic Criteria
| Scope/Content | 14/15 |
| Authority/Bias | 10/15 |
| Permanence and Timeliness | 9/15 |
| Value Added Features | 5/15 |
| Technical Aspects | 10/15 |
| Aesthetics/Clarity | 12/15 |
| Overall Impression | 9/10 |
Public History Specific Criteria
| Interpretation of Materials | 28/40 |
| Primary Source Documents | 12/20 |
| Education | 10/20 |
| Promotion of a Community of Interest | 8/20 |
Total: 127 points -- 3.5 Earths
Murney Gerlach (mgerlach@rbhayes.org) received a Ph.D. from Oxford University in modern British and American
history, and his main research has been on 19th century British-American relations, the Gilded
Age, 18th and 19th century political and social thought, and transatlantic liberalism. He has taught at San Diego State University, the University of San Diego, Brown University, Roger Williams University, University of Rhode Island, Brant College and Rhode Island College, on American, British, European history. He is a former University Archivist and Special Collections librarian, SDSU, also former director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and Assistant Secretary of the Corporation at Brown University. He has been active with the American Association of Museums, American Association for State and Local History, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and National Council on Public History. His most recent publication is British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late-Victorian Age (Palgrave, 2001), and he is currently the Executive Director of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, and Sec./Treasurer for the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
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