Political Americana
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About this collection
This digital collection includes images of political campaign memorabilia. Political campaign memorabilia became a focus at Cornell in 1957, when Cornell Library’s Dept. of Manuscripts and University Archives (now part of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library) began receiving a large gift of 5,500 campaign items collected by Susan H. Douglas. Dating between 1789 and 1960, the Douglas collection includes ballots, three-dimensional objects, broadsides, buttons, cartoons, maps and charts, pamphlets, parade items, posters, prints, ribbons, sheet music, songbooks, textiles, trinkets, wearing apparel, and souvenirs of all kinds such as plates, cups, vases, coins, trays, bottles, plaques, busts, statues, clocks, sewing boxes, and games.
Historical context
For more than 200 years, Presidential campaigns have relied partly on material culture to attract votes. Most elections have inspired and made use of objects—jewelry, bandanas, walking sticks, ceramic plates, lapel ribbons, buttons, bumper stickers—for partisan purposes. Commemorative items celebrate centennials, honor American leaders, or lament their passings. This material culture, along with paper ephemera such as cartoons, prints, and posters, can inform the study of more conventional documentary sources on American political history. Political memorabilia are a particularly rich resource for understanding the transformation of American politics across the 19th and 20th centuries, documenting expanding avenues of activism and electioneering, shifting political party platforms, and the culture of nominating conventions. Beyond their immediate goal of promoting political candidates and their parties, these physical objects also served to simplify complex personalities and issues and generate and maintain emotional bonds between candidates and constituencies. Through their texts, imagery, design and materials, campaign memorabilia offer direct access to lives of everyday people and their concerns.
Using the collection
The items in this collection are digital surrogates of a number of physical object types (e.g., textiles, buttons, posters, pins, glassware) which can be explored using the Work Type facet.
For more information about the collection, please contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest Stern Curator, Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Institute of Museum and Library Studies, 2001
- Credits
- This collection overview was last reviewed in 2025.
- Collection sources