ABSTRACT
This article explores the emergence of sporting-themed political cartoons in early nineteenth-century America. By using material culture and archaeological methodologies, rather than a traditional visual culture approach, it both explains the genre’s development in terms of context (a changing electoral system) and also situates the cartoons within a wider range of sources revealing sport’s broader function in that context. In the end, the ‘sporting political cartoon’ appears as an efficient and persuasive symbol, but just one part, of a larger project involving the application of a contentious white masculine sporting culture to party politics.
