E 270 Lecture Notes - Townshend Acts, George Whitefield, Gadsden Flag
Document Summary
North american front of seven years war (france vs. britain for global influence) Crown and colonies both think it will lessen their own power. Benjamin franklin introduced the image and idea of the rattlesnake into american political discourse. In 1754, to promote his own albany plan of union, and the need for all british colonists to oppose their french and indian enemies with a united front, Franklin published a woodcut widely recognized as the first political cartoon published in. In the cartoon franklin depicts a rattlesnake divided into eight labeled segments one each for n[ew]. Join, or die below, a rather ironic image since the rattlesnake was a serpent more closely indentified with the native american enemies franklin warned of than the english colonists he sought to unify. Over the next twenty years franklin"s woodcut was adopted, adapted, and widely reprinted by newspapers from south carolina to massachusetts, and by the time of the.
