Our Watering-Places — Views at Long Branch

Drawn by Thomas Nast and subtitled *The Sea Side*, this full-page plate assembles seven vignettes of the New Jersey resort town just months after the Civil War's end. A panoramic central beach scene anchors the composition, peopled with bathers, promenaders, and children at the surf. Surrounding panels — labeled *Arriving*, *Music on the Lawn*, *They Love It So*, *Montague and Caplet*, *Evening in the Parlor*, and *Romeo and Juliet* — capture the full arc of a fashionable seaside holiday: crowded hotels, moonlit concerts, a ballroom, and couples courting at the water's edge. The tone is celebratory rather than polemical: Nast here functions as social reporter, advertising the pleasures of leisure culture to a Northern readership still exhaling after four years of war. No ethnic caricature is legible in this plate.