Life and Death in Early Modern Europe

The primary source for this lesson is: An Irish epitaph from the British Cartoon Prints collection (Library of Congress). The instructor provides the students with a link to the cartoon and a transcription of the cartoon as students may experience difficulties deciphering the handwriting on the cartoon. 

The students also read a secondary source, Enya Holland's "Anti-Irish Sentiment in Early Modern Britain", in preparation for the class meeting. David Hayton's "From Barbarian to Burlesque: English Images of the Irish, c. 1660-1750," Irish Economic and Social History XV (1988): 5-31, is another secondary source that can be used alternatively or in addition to Holland. 

It is helpful to show the cartoon in class, by handing out print-outs, so that each student has a personal copy to look at, and/or by displaying the cartoon on a large screen, so that the instructor can zoom in on details during the class discussion. 

The lesson begins with a short lecture by the instructor that complements the readings by providing some additional details about English attitudes toward the Irish between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The instructor uses other early modern depictions—visual and textual—of the Irish to establish that the English long held prejudices against the Irish. Examples include the images in John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande (1581), Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topographia Hibernica (c. 1188) and many others. The instructor also briefly explains the historical context of the cartoon. (10 minutes) 

The students are then asked to form small groups. Each group is handed the worksheet “Analyzing cartoons,” which was adapted from the Library of Congress Teacher's Guide to Analyzing Political Cartoons. The instructor reminds students that, when conducting research, the first step is always observation, followed by reflection and drawing conclusions about the meaning of a source and asking further questions. Students are asked to strictly separate their observations of the cartoon from their interpretation as they engage with the cartoon and record their answers to the questions on the worksheet. (20 minutes) 

For the “reflection” part of their group work, students are encouraged to carefully note the information about the cartoon on the Library of Congress website (e.g. date of publication) and to perform an internet search about any historical events or details that they think might be relevant for an interpretation of the cartoon. 

During the second half of the course meeting, each group of students is asked to step forward and explain to their classmates their observations, reflections, and questions. This can take different forms. For example, students can be asked to record their responses on posters to be displayed in class or they can prepare short presentations. (30 minutes)  

In an online course, students can be asked to post to a discussion board or create a Voicethread.  

At the end of the class period, the instructor takes up any loose threads. They answer questions about the context of the cartoon, in particular living conditions in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Irish emigration to North America, and the aftermath of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. The instructor engages with the “who? what? when? where? why? how?” questions the students brought up, and they encourage students to share more details of what they would like to find out and provide additional information and contextualization in response. (15 minutes)

Except for the readings mentioned above, there are no out-of-class assignments associated with this lesson. Students may use information they have acquired from working on this anti-Irish cartoon to craft their signature assignment, for example by choosing to write about an aspect of Irish history or by creating a fictional Irish person for their invented primary source. 

Except for taking attendance, this is an ungraded, low-stakes activity in class. Student learning takes place without formal assessment as students discuss their impressions in small groups and each group has to give a short presentation of the results of their group work in front of the entire class. 

"Observing" visual primary sources

The process of first observing and then reflecting on a primary source can help to make visual primary sources accessible to students who are vision-impaired and enable these students to fully participate in this lesson.  

If a class participant is vision-impaired, other students in the course can describe the visual primary source to the student who is vision-impaired during the “observation” part of the group work. It might be helpful to divide the group work into two formal sessions, “observation” and “reflection,” to ensure that students do not mix these two forms of primary source engagement. During the observation part of the group work, all students will benefit: The student who is vision-impaired will be provided an image description that is as accurate as possible because the other members of the group will pool their observations. The students will learn to strictly separate observation from reflection because they have to focus on first providing the student who is vision-impaired with a description before being able to move on to a group discussion of the meaning of the primary source.