1836 - 1839
The text from the top two rows is from A People’s History of the United States pages 228 - 229.
Memo: In the risk of sounding like a pretentious jag, I’ll say, while I worked on the illustrations I was listening to The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon. It occurred to me that under certain context that this comic page is just one more contribution toward turning Harriet Hanson into a legend, in reference to La Bon’s discussion of how demagogs use history and mythologize the past to control their audience. Of course there’s no perfect equilibrium between individuality and collective action, that’s just the perpetual struggle of living in an imperfect world and society.
I hope that through this constant process of development, a viewer of this blog can understand that the amount of portraits generated has more to do with diluting legend making rather than exploiting it. If you read the rest of the chapter from A People’s History you will find a very difficult path the Mill Girls took, not to say it wasn’t a worthy cause and Harriet Hanson wasn’t courageous. Out of all the facts in A People’s History the Harriet Hanson story stuck out the most to me and I knew a couple of years ago that I would eventually get to making some illustrations for it. Thanks again to Maria for sending me the book.
