Lusitanic definitions of "Lusitanic" or "Lusitanian" may include medieval-to-modern Galicia, because the Portuguese people and Galician people share close linguistic and cultural ties, including pre-Roman Celtic ones. Modern Portuguese and the Galician language both derive from medieval Galician-Portuguese, and the term is a cultural classification more than a historic–geographical definition. Although, in Ancient Roman times, the Gallaeci were not part of Lusitania province, what became the Galician-Portuguese language developed from Vulgar Latin in Gallaecia, which comprised what is now Galicia, as well as north Portugal, the center of the development of post-Roman Portuguese culture. Later Portuguese use of the name "Lusitania"
The Sinking of the Lusitania event outraged McCay, but the newspapers of his employer William Randolph Hearst downplayed the event, as Hearst was opposed to the US joining World War I. McCay was required to illustrate anti-war and anti-British editorial cartoons for Hearst's papers. In 1916, McCay rebelled against his employer's stance and began work on the patriotic "Sinking of the Lusitania" on his own time with his own money. The film followed McCay's earlier successes in animation: "Little Nemo" (1911), "How a Mosquito Operates" (1912), and "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914). McCay drew these earlier films on rice paper, onto which backgrounds had to be