Inciting Americans at home to do their part in producing for the war effort, the poster-inexpensive, accessible, and ever-present-was an ideal agent for making war aims the personal mission of every citizen. From 1941 to 1945, government agencies, businesses, and private organizations issued an array of poster images linking the military front with the home front, calling upon all Americans to boost production at work and at home. The U.S. Office of War Information created the "Poster Pledge," urging volunteers to "avoid poster waste," "treat posters as real war ammunition," and "never let a poster lie idle." This colorful collection of over 150 World War II-era posters focuses on the theme of wartime production on the home front. The range of designs and images will inspire graphic designers, while the descriptive captions and informative text will interest history and military buffs. Some of the famous slogans these posters introduced include "When you ride alone you ride with Hitler," "She won't talk-will you? The enemy has ears," "This is America...Keep it Free," and "Remember Pearl Harbor-purl harder!"

With powerful, often shocking immediacy, the 317 posters reproduced and discussed in this volume document the political and military conflicts of our century. These works reveal their meaning most clearly when we do not relegate them to the function of illustrating a text or see them merely as specimens of the applied arts, but take them seriously as unique combinations of historical witness and aesthetic object. Drawn from Russia, Central and Western Europe, and the United States, from the turn of the century to the aftermath of the Second World War, the posters form a bridge between the claims of ideology and the state on the one hand and the support or submission of millions of men and women on the other. How can men be persuaded to fight for their party or country, and how can women be convinced to enter the workforce in wartime and retreat to the home when their men return? How can women be brought to believe that losing their husbands and sons is a noble sacrifice? Where can money be found to pay for the costs of the war and of reconstruction? Are guilt, compassion, and fear sufficient to bind the homefront to the fighting men? What is the most effective way to dehumanize the enemy, whether foreign or domestic? These are some of the issues that the posters in this volume lay bare and begin to explain. Together text and image open fresh perspectives on half a century of war, revolution, and renewed war, and point toward a new kind of integrative history. Except for seven posters, the images in this book are from the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Peace and Revolution at Stanford University. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Herbert Hoover began to collect documents, including posters, from the warring powers. He laid the foundation for one of the world's great poster collections, now consisting of some 75,000 posters as well as of nearly 40,000 proclamations and other purely typographical announcements.

Focuses on the organization's history and general strategies, mentions ads and brochures, not emphasizing posters.

"We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re-examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'--which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever-present wholeness--will shelter us. The PC buttons on historians' chests today stand not for 'politically correct' but 'positively cultural.'--from the Introduction More and more scholars are turning to cultural history in order to make sense of the American past. This volume brings together nine original essays by some leading practitioners in the field. The essays aim to exhibit the promise of a cultural approach to understanding the range of American experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Expanding on the editors' pathbreaking The Culture of Consumption, the contributors to this volume argue for a cultural history that attends closely to language and textuality without losing sight of broad configurations of power that social and political history at its best has always stressed. The authors here freshly examine crucial topics in both private and public life. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the power of culture in the lives of Americans past and present.

A visual survey of all forms of propaganda used by Allied and Axis powers immediately before and during World War II.

Legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan, CIA directors Allen Dulles and William Casey, journalists Stewart Alsop and James Reston, diplomat John McCloy, philanthropist Paul Mellon, playwright Robert Sherwood, theatrical great John Houseman, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche were among the thousands of people who led or participated in America's massive propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany. In The Propaganda Warriors Clayton Laurie fully unveils for the first time this unprecedented, ambitious, and embattled wartime enterprise. Laurie details the creation, evolution, and field operations of the overseas branch of the Office of War Information (OWI); the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and the Army-dominated Psychological Warfare units (PWB and PWD) serving the Allied forces in Europe. These agencies, Laurie shows, were as much at war with each other as with the Third Reich, largely due to FDR's failure to establish an official propaganda policy or to enunciate precise war and postwar aims. Within this vacuum, each agency eagerly developed its own distinct form of propaganda. The propagandists at OWI and OSS (forerunner of the CIA) were especially at odds with each other. The OSS was led by Machiavellian "realists," conservatives, and Republicans who wanted American values to dominate the international order and believed that any means--including the Nazi's own subversive "black" propaganda--justified that end. By contrast, the OWI was led by liberals, New Dealers, and those in the media and arts who adhered to Wilsonian ideals and believed that the truth about America, as they perceived it, would win out through the sheer power of its message. They detested the Nazi regime every bit as much as their OSS counterparts but refused to emulate Nazi tactics. Despite these conflicts, American propaganda did accelerate the drive toward victory, thanks to the emergence of the PWB and PWD, which after 1943 controlled the production of American propaganda against Germany, bending ideological agendas to serve the military's purely tactical objectives. But, as Laurie makes clear, all three agencies played a vital role in this crucial effort, even as their conflicts foreshadowed future ideological disputes during the Cold War.

Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. When America's men went off to war in 1942, millions of women were recruited, through posters and other propaganda, to work at non-traditional jobs.  In defense plants, factories, offices, and everywhere else workers were needed, they were--for the first time--well paid and financially independent.  But eventually the war ended, and the government and industries that had once persuaded them to work for the war effort now instructed them to return home and take care of their husbands and children.  Based on interviews and original research by noted historian Penny Colman,Rosie the Rivetershows young readers how women fought World War II from the home front.  

[Exhibition] from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Political History. Circulated by the Smithsonian Institution.

Collects a wide variety of posters designed to influence public opinion concerning wars ranging from World War I to the Vietnamese War.

World War I was the first war in which the pictorial full color poster played a major propaganda role. The era's greatest illustrators and fine artists contributed their energies to produce hundreds of great and classic posters. A surprising number of these posters have survived and many are still found in attics and barns today. This book illustrates over 450 World War I posters that were produced in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Many great classics are featured, but numerous less dramatic posters are also included which still have much historic importance. The text discusses the history of World War I posters and how they were designed and printed by color lithography. The book also devotes considerable attention to issues relevant to collectors: condition, conservation, display, and value. World War I posters are increasing in recognition and value as new collectors discover the beauty and power of these historic artifacts.