SOURCE: “Ethnic Stereotyping in American Popular Culture: The Depiction of American Ethnics in the Cartoon Periodicals of the Gilded Age,” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1985, pp. 489-507.

In the excerpt below, Dormon surveys the use of ethnic stereotypes in American cartoon periodicals of the Gilded Age. He argues that they express increasing levels of fear and ethnocentrism in response to immigration.

Images of ethnic minorities in the United States have long been subjects of the popular media and the performing arts, and have provided a rich store of American humor, primarily in the form of caricature presentation. Afro-Americans, for example, began to appear prominently on the stage as early as the 1820s in the phenomenally popular act developed by Thomas Dartmouth (“Jim Crow”) Rice, who sought and found an unlimited fund of high hilarity in “Jumping Jim Crow,” ultimately producing a full-blown stage black caricature that sustained...