Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, has been illustrated by artists for centuries, and each approach shapes how readers understand the story. Some illustrators portrayed the knight as a comic fool, tilting at windmills for laughs, others as a noble idealist whose delusions are tragic. Gustave Doré's engravings of the 1860s gave the knight and his squire Sancho Panza the tall-and-thin and short-and-round look that became the standard image. The book's picture history shows how an illustration is also an interpretation, steering readers toward humour, pathos or satire. Cervantes died in 1616, 400 years before this commemoration.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.