Ohio State is giving history teachers throughout the United States the opportunity to spice up their dull classes with the use of vintage editorial cartoons.

The Opper Project was created by OSU’s Cartoon Research Library, the History Teaching Institute at OSU and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. The project allows K-12 history teachers to use editorial cartoons and accompanying lesson plans for certain topics in American history.

“Right now we have 12 lesson plans and 72 cartoons at the moment,” said Stuart Hobbs, director of the History Teaching Institute. Events such as the civil rights movement, the Red Scare and women’s suffrage have already been created. Hobbs said more lesson plans and more cartoons will likely be added as the program develops. Teachers can download both the lessons and the cartoons at the Opper Project Web site: hti.osu.edu/opper/index.cfm.

The project is named after Frederick Burr Opper, an Ohioan who is regarded as one of the first great editorial cartoonists.

Hobbs said the project began about a year ago with the use of teacher workshops to find out how to lay out the lesson plans. He said another workshop is planned for the future, which will bring together teachers throughout the United States. At a price tag of about $140,000, however, that workshop is at the mercy of a pending grant proposal.

Because the project is in its early stages, Hobbs said minimal feedback from the teachers who are using the plans is collected. He said that workshops are vital to getting feedback and improving the project. Evan Smith is a Marysville High School history teacher who used the Opper Project for his world history and American government classes this year. Overall, Smith said he has been satisfied with the results.

“The lessons are very successful because most my students really enjoy interpreting the cartoons,” Smith said. “They get a kick out of how historical figures are caricatured and many get to use their creativity and explain how they would have drawn the cartoons better.”The cartoons being used in the project come from the OSU Cartoon Research Library inside the Wexner Center. Professor and curator of the library, Lucy Caswell, said the library has the largest collection of printed cartoons in the nation. The library has more than 250,000 original cartoons, including editorial cartoons, comic strips and comic books. It is a library that Hobbs said needs to be utilized.

“The library is the largest repository of editorial cartoons in the nation, so this is a great national resource that we’re making available here,” Hobbs said.

Matt Nichols can be reached at [email protected].