This latest unburied 4th floor Sawyer Library gem, Europe Since Versailles, features political cartoons drawn by Sir David Low from the decades between World War I and World War II. During this time of shaky peace, Sir Low's caricatures lambasted world nations and their leaders as their political interactions frequently presaged being sucked into a second world war. So pointed were the critiques against Nazi "governance" in particular, that Adolf Hitler himself placed Sir David Low on a list of people to be rounded up after Germany's conquest over England (Streicher, 6). Fortunately for Low, England never fell to Germany, and he continued designing scathing editorial cartoons, thumbing his nose at Hitler's apoplectic rage. In this reprinted edition of Sir David Low's works, Lawrence Streicher has added an introduction, epilogue, and partial bibliography of Low's collected works. Frequent characters in Low's satirical cartoons include: Maxim Litvinov, Neville Chamberlain, Pierre Laval, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Aristide Briand, and Joseph Stalin. Check out this item to chuckle at sharp images depicting the ineffectiveness of politics (my, how things change!), or bemoan the inevitability of civilian pain and suffering at the end of this era.
Image credit: "DAVID LOW (English Cartoonist)" belongs to Flickr user NCMallory. License to use: CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en)
