Todd Nathan Thompson (Department of Language, Literature, and Writing) recently published an article titled “‘Mr. Seward’s Real Estate Transactions’: Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era” in a special issue of Studies in American Humor on “Humor of the Gilded Age.”
Thompson’s essay examines several strands of popularly circulating periodical humor that ridiculed the United States’ nascent attempts at imperial acquisition, including humor and satire in newspaper squibs by Mark Twain and others, jocular editorial commentary on Alaska, and political cartoons in humor magazines. All these comic critiques of US expansionism, Thompson argues, traffic in the negative effects of cynicism and distrust as they redefine postbellum US foreign policy decisions as geopolitical manifestations of the unscrupulous greed and graft emblematic of the Gilded Age.
Access the article online at Studies in American Humor.