Life — June 30, 1927 — page 6: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis This page from *Life* magazine satirizes American history through mock-serious cartoons. The top illustration mocks colonial encounters—two British soldiers dismiss a Chinese merchant as a "terrible dump," mocking cultural superiority attitudes. The text below parodies history textbooks with deliberately absurd claims: America was "discovered" by drunk Dutchmen, George Washington became president solely to avoid work, and Francis Scott Key sold his poem for pennies while George M. Cohan profited enormously. The bottom cartoon shows De Soto "discovering" the Mississippi River while Native Americans (labeled "injuns") ask if he's seen anything of a Mississippi River—a joke about European "discovery" of lands already known to indigenous peoples. The satire targets pretentious historical narratives and their erasure of prior inhabitants and non-European perspectives.