Some Tableaux From a Comic History of the United States by Ralph Barton, Historian, Satirist and Sometime Artist

Being the First Private Showing of Some Keyhole Landscapes in the Intimate Life of a Nation as Observed in an Ugly and Realistic Mood by an Irreverent But Eminent Peeping-Tom

THESE hand-picked lantern slides from Mr. Ralph Barton's titanic tour de force of extra-curricular scholarship, God's Country, a Short History of the United States, are dedicated to Americans Who Think. Mr. Barton's book which is soon to be published by the house of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., is in the boudoir or tabloid tradition of history. The nation's family skeletons come tumbling out of the closet by the platoon. Mr. Barton's reader is able to discern behind the red, white and blue smile the good old bleeding heart. The captains and the kings go where they were going anyway; still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, the eternal Lowest Common Denominator of homo sapiens Americanus. This history cannot be recommended to Mayor Thompson of Chicago; but he will have what he wants if he turns this version precisely upside-down and hindside-foremost. Mr. Barton, heretofore a caricaturist, whose first excursion this is into the prose medium, has fabricated his romance on the premise that America cannot be dealt with as a glorious generality; that it must be pasted together piecemeal as a mosaic of time and place particularities. Crowned heads and potentates are just Uncle Jake and Aunt Minnie to this historian. A second group of drawings from his History will be published in the February issue of Vanity Fair