Explore the cartoons and columns of an array of late-19th-century American humorists and political commentators, including:

Finley Peter Dunne, aka "Mr. Dooley" (1867-1936), who captured life in Chicago's Irish immigrant wards while critiquing national politics, especially American imperialism in the Caribbean and Philippines.  His collection Mr. Dooley's Philosophy was illustrated by Frederick Opper (see below)

Marietta Holley, aka "Josiah Allen's Wife" (1836-1926), who took the voice of a sensible ordinary woman to defend women's rights, poke fun at male pretensions, and satirize high society in works like Samantha at Saratoga (1887)

Joseph Keppler (1838-1894), an Austrian-born editor who started his career producing German-language magazines in St. Louis before moving to New York and winning national fame with Puck, a reform-minded, Democratic-leaning weekly packed with political commentary and color lithographs, including many cartoons by Frederick Opper (see below)

David Ross Locke, aka "Petroleum B. Nasby" (1833-1888), a favorite of Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant. Locke used the pages of his Toledo Blade to express staunch support for Republican Reconstruction policies in the South and to ridicule, in scathing satires, ex-Confederate racism and intransigence

Bill Nye (1850-1896), a Maine-born newspaperman who made his name as editor of the Laramie Boomerang in Wyoming. His satiric Bill Nye's History of the United States (1894) was illustrated by the ubiquitous Frederick Opper (see below)

Frederick Opper (1857-1937), one of the fathers of the modern American comic strip, who joined Puck in 1881 (see Joseph Keppler, above) and in 1897 went to work for William Randolph Hearst.  A fierce critic of
William McKinley and corporate money in politics (see his New York Journal cartoons in the 1896 section of this site), Opper also produced the beloved Sunday-comic characters "Happy Hooligan" and "Alphonse and Gaston."