The Donkey of Democracy antedates the Republican Elephant by more than four years. It was in the issue of Harper's Weekly for Jan. 15, 1870, that the long-eared animal dropped off the tip of Nast ...

Decades later, the connection was cemented by political cartoonist Thomas Nast. In his 1870 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion,” Nast used the donkey to represent ...

But it was Nast’s revival of the Democratic donkey in his Jan. 18, 1870 cartoon, shown above — “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” — that popularized the symbol.

Thomas Nast, the German-born editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly magazine, came up with both of them — he introduced the donkey first, on Jan. 19, 1870: 155 years ago Sunday.

This political cartoon by Thomas Nast, taken from a 1879 edition of Harper's Weekly, was an early use of the elephant and the donkey to sybolize the Republican and Democratic parties. | getarchive.net ...

The same 19th-century political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, is credited with popularizing both symbols, though he didn’t create either. What is the history behind the donkey for Democrats?

In 1870, Thomas Nast, the German-born political cartoonist who gave us the versions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam we know today, drew a cartoon for Harper’s Weekly titled “A Live Jackass ...

The Republican elephant was first seen in an 1874 cartoon by satirist and conservative cartoonist Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly. "The elephant was a wing of the party that was stodgy and immobile ...

However, it took several decades before the donkey became synonymous with the entire Democratic party when political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the animal by using it in his cartoons ...