visual literacy 2

 The prompt has been updated so I'm going to add a few things regarding visual literacy. What I found most interesting about the chapter was the analysis of the ad about ADHD. One of my favorite shows is Mad Men, which is about an advertising agency in the 1960s. Learning more about the complexity of advertisements was enjoyable because the show never talked about the subliminal meanings of their ads or the use of color or anything like that. In my experience, deciphering the literal and deeper meanings of an image is very important since I am a history major. Political cartoons, paintings, and pictures are all extremely valuable sources for understanding history, especially if they are primary sources. For example, knowing that a person who looks like a monkey was used to represent the Irish, like in the image below, is essential for understanding nativism at the turn of the century. Nowhere does it say that the person is Irish, so one must be able to infer from the bottle of rum and notice the word "Fenian" in the background to understand the meaning of the political cartoon.