Our Watering-Places — Views at Long Branch

Drawn by Thomas Nast and subtitled The Sea Side, this full-page plate assembles seven vignettes of the New Jersey resort town just months after the Civil War's end. A panoramic central beach scene anchors the composition, peopled with bathers, promenaders, and children at the surf. Surrounding panels — labeled Arriving, Music on the Lawn, They Love It So, Montague and Caplet, Evening in the Parlor, and Romeo and Juliet — capture the full arc of a fashionable seaside holiday: crowded hotels, moonlit concerts, a ballroom, and couples courting at the water's edge. The tone is celebratory rather than polemical: Nast here functions as social reporter, advertising the pleasures of leisure culture to a Northern readership still exhaling after four years of war. No ethnic caricature is legible in this plate.