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A classic bit of visual 20th century Americana by one of the most important illustrators of the era, R. Crumb.
The poster presents a vision of the early history of America, from bucolic pre-settlement times up to the then-present-day of concrete, telephone poles, cars, etc. The image presents three potential future: apocalyptic "ecological disaster"; techno-futuristic utopia "the fun future: techno-fix on the march"; and the hippie "ecotopian solution".
Open Culture wrote of Crumb's A Short History of America:
Crumb’s love for simpler times is more than the passion of an aficionado. It is the flip side of his satire, a genre that cannot flourish as a critique of the present without a corresponding vision of a golden age. For Crumb, that age is pre-WWII, pre-industrial, rural—a time, as he has put it in a recent interview, when “people could still express themselves.” His experience with the slop of American popular culture was decidedly less idyllic. Ian Buruma writes in The New York Review of Books:
Crumb, like his brothers, soaked up the TV and comics culture of the 1950s: Howdy Doody, Donald Duck, Roy Rogers, Little Lulu, and the like. While on LSD, in the 1960s, Crumb thought of his mind as “a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically!”
![[Pictish Man Holding Sword and Pike] Alterius viri Pictis vicini icon IIII](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/99890.jpg)
![[Illuminated World Map -- There is no region of the world which Jesus, like the sun, does not enrich...] Orbis nulla plaga est quam sol non ditet Iesus...](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/62347.jpg)
