My History Paper

[S-uper_T-oast]

Here in it's entirety, is my latest History Paper. It's a book review on a book that had something to do with history. Please, don't steal it (like you would really want to)
Anybody who cares to is free to critique it to their heart's content, if they care to read it all the way through.

heres the book Dr. Seus Goes to War

John ********
History
P.5

Dr. Seuss Goes to War
When you hear the name Dr. Seuss, the first thing that comes to your mind are stories like “Green Eggs and Ham“, “The Cat in the Hat“, “To Think I Saw it All on Mulberry Street“, and many other similar stories. Now, while these stories may be very nice stories, to say that they were the only things Dr. Seuss did in his career is greatly underestimating his life. The book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, written by Richard H. Minear, tells the story of Dr. Seuss’ early career, a career filled with war, scandals, and politics. To get the whole picture of Dr. Seuss you have to know his background. Once you know this you can start to see how the political cartoons he drew during World War II not only shaped public opinion in his time, but also influenced his story characters of future years.

Theodor Seuss Geisel
In 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was born into a very German family that attended mass in German and spoke German in the house. Theodor went to Springfield Public Schools, and after high school, he went to Dartmouth College. He had been drawing cartoons on and off through high school, but once at Dartmouth, Theodor began drawing cartoons for the college humor magazine. A small run-in with college authorities over bootleg liquor forced him to draw these cartoons under an alias, he chose his middle name Seuss. Once he graduated from Dartmouth, Theodor went for postgraduate study at Oxford. One year into Oxford, he left when he decided that postgraduate study wasn’t for him. Theodor never earned a true Doctorate Degree, but he received an honorary one once he became successful. His short time at Oxford may not have gotten Theodore a Ph.D., but it did give him a taste of Europe. A few years traveling around Europe, and Dr. Seuss settled down in New York City and started drawing cartoons professionally. Theodore started his drawing career doing freelance cartoons for various magazines in journals. His jobs ranged from obscure humor magazines like Judge to more prestigious journals such as the Saturday Evening Post. After a short time working for Standard Oil of New Jersey, Theodore then started drawing cartoons for the magazine PM. PM was a short lived “popular front” tabloid that spewed political propaganda during World War II. He worked at PM from early 1941 to January 1943. In this time span, there were months were the U.S. was at war and months when the U.S. was at peace, but Dr. Seuss’ cartoons reflected the ideas of the time, all of them pro-war in one way or another.

Dr. Seuss’ Political Cartoons
PM was a political magazine; it gave hard “facts” and usually accompanied them with catchy pictures and cartoons. Dr. Seuss worked at PM for two years and during those years; he drew hundreds of cartoons, sometimes at a rate of three to four per week. These cartoons are where he first developed many of the characters that would be made famous latter in his career. Dr. Seuss drew his cartoons to combat everything he saw as wrong in the U.S during and before WWII. He attacked isolationists, anti-Semitism, wind-bags, political red tape, anti-war, pro-war with no action, bearcats, fascism, Lindbergh, Axis leaders, complacency, political squabbles, pessimists, racists, and a multitude of other groups and people all while keeping a pro-war focus. Dr. Seuss used his cartoons to illustrate the need and influence the people to get behind the war effort at home. These cartoons may have had very serious messages, but he still used the same over the top drawing style used in his latter stories.

The Real Dr. Seuss
Most people think of Dr. Seuss as nothing more then a children’s book writer, this is an understatement of his life’s accomplishments. His cartoons at PM illustrated a country’s feelings and emotions at a time of war. He shows the way people were acting in response to the war, and not just the negative side. Dr. Seuss also draws the positive side of how people supported the war. A large part of this book is written to show the type of things Dr. Seuss did before he became famous for his latter stories. This book illustrates the beginning of his career were he first developed many of his characters he would use latter. Dr. Seuss was more then just a poet with a unique drawing style and a talent for writing stories, he was a politically active free thinker who was ahead of his time in many of his views.

An Excellent Book
This book gives a chronological timeline of Dr. Seuss’ cartoons though the war. One does not just read about the drawings, you see everything laid out for you. This allows you to watch and see the progression of not only his cartoons, but also the American attitudes about the war at home. That is another of this books great features, it shows a detailed picture of what the American people at home were feeling. It shows their attitudes and their feelings to the changing world they lived in. The main point of the book is still to illustrate Dr. Seuss’ start in drawing, and it does it does it exceptionally well. The book contains sections that first go through the timeline and describe the changing nature and the symbolism behind the cartoons that Dr. Seuss was drawing. It also contains hundreds of his cartoons with the date they were published. It’s amazing to see the familiar drawing styles from stories like “The Cat in the Hat” used to draw Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the Japanese Empire, and the United States all interacting with each other in the same over the top style as the stories. Some of the cartoons even include a few creative limericks and poems that help communicate the countries attitudes.
This book can be a valuable resource to just about anybody. I would recommend it to any person who likes Dr. Seuss’ stories so that they can get a better understanding of Dr. Seuss’ background and experience he is using to draw them. This book would also be a valuable resource to anybody who is interested in World War II. This story shows World War II from the home front, it gives the story of the attitudes and feelings of the people at home in the United States, not just the battles or the main political leaders. To get a full understanding of World War II, you have to look at the personal side of it. A war is not just won by soldiers alone, it is won through a united effort of a whole nation. Political cartoons are part of this, because they can be used to influence thousands of people who read them. These cartoons are also influenced by the people, and can be seen as mirrors of the emotions the people felt at the given time.

Dr. Seuss may have become famous for his children’s books, but his political cartoons may have been more monumental then all his books put together. These cartoons challenged the readers. It changed the reader’s thoughts about the war, but at the same time reflected the thoughts of the same people. The book “Dr. Seuss Goes to War” shows this progression through these cartoons, from pre-war America, through Pearl Harbor, and up to two years before the wars end when Dr. Seuss then took a job in the U.S government treasury department in 1943. Dr. Seuss may be remembered for his cute stories, it didn’t all start on Mulberry Street though, it started in his hard-hitting political propaganda for a news tabloid in New York City.