Looking for sources? Search EBSCO or QuickSearch.
ART 131 Assignment Playbook
Learn how to do a visual analysis of propaganda posters for ART 131.
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Charlottesville, VA 22902
434.961.5309
reference@pvcc.edu
Belle's Visual Analysis Assignment
For this assignment, you will research propaganda and how institutions such as governments or movements use images to persuade their audience to support their plan or agenda. You will choose an institution and propaganda focus and provide images and historical context .
Propaganda
Propaganda "appears in a variety of forms. It is strategic and intentional as it aims to influence attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. Propaganda can be beneficial or harmful. It may use truth, half-truths, or lies. To be successful, propaganda taps into our deepest values, fears, hopes, and dreams." -- Steven Luckert and Susan Bachrach, authors of The State of Deception, 2009
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What Is Propaganda?
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ISBN: 9781541555761Publication Date: 2019-08-01Introduce readers to the concept of propaganda by analyzing examples from the past and present. This approachable overview includes tips on how to spot propaganda and how to respond to fake news. -
Media, Persuasion and Propaganda
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ISBN: 9780748644162Publication Date: 2015-02-13Living in a saturated media environment, we are crowded from all sides by persuasive messages and information. Advice, promotion and propaganda form a spectrum of persuasion - and everywhere we see it performed in its full theatricality, complete with actors, scripts, props and costumes. Based on enduring rhetorical principles, these persuasive techniques and the psychology behind them have become increasingly sophisticated during the 'age of persuasion', a century of applied research in advertising, advocacy, public relations, mass entertainment and social control. Media, Persuasion, and Propaganda guides the reader through the many varieties of persuasion and its performance, exploring the protocols of rhetoric unique to the medium, from orality and print to film and digital images. -
How Propaganda Works
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Call Number: HM1231 .S83 2015ISBN: 9780691173429Publication Date: 2016-12-06Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us -- not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In "How Propaganda Works", Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy -- particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality -- and how it has damaged democracies of the past.
Find academic sources
- QuickSearch, the library's catalog, and the library databases can provide you with all the sources you need for your presentation.
- Search strategically: use nouns and combine them with AND. These nouns should be specific to your topic.
- Examples:
- Your presentation is about the suffragist movement in the United States. Your search would then be: suffrage AND women AND united states
- Your presentation will focus on Russia. First, you must choose an era or time frame to focus on--there's a lot of history to choose from!--and then choose your keywords. Examples:
- Russia AND World War I AND propaganda
- Soviet Union AND propaganda
- Other suggested searches:
- World War, 1914-1918 -- Propaganda (as a subject search)
- Search by creator/designer/artist name: Johann von Leers
- Examples:
- The library has many databases, but you will want to start with these:
- In addition to the books linked on this playbook, use QuickSearch to find historical and cultural context for your chosen government, era, or movement.
- Find background information on your country or movement by using Gale eBooks.
- Use the EBSCO portal to have access to a wealth of different databases and millions of articles. See also the list of databases below.
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EBSCO This link opens in a new window
Choose from multiple databases within the EBSCO platform. These databases cover a wide range of subjects, including history, communications, sociology, religion, biology etc.
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Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window
A set of electronic encyclopedias and reference books covering a wide variety of subjects and disciplines, such as health and medicine, history, and criminal justice. (Gale)
Finding Sources
This is not an exhaustive list of resources, but they could be a good place to start.
Suggested books:
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The Birth of the Propaganda State
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ISBN: 9780511572623Publication Date: 2009-12-02In this comprehensive study of the early development of the Soviet propaganda system, Peter Kenez describes how the Bolshevik Party went about reaching the Russian people. Throughout this book, Kenez is more concerned with the experience of the Soviet people than with high-level politics. The book is both a major contribution to our understanding of the genius of the Soviet state, and of the nature of propaganda in the modern world. -
Communist Posters
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Call Number: NC1806.8 .C66 2017ISBN: 9781780237244Publication Date: 2017-06-15The powerful -- and often beautifully wrought -- artwork of communist regimes has been created to ensure the successes of their revolutions. Because of their ease of distribution, posters have figured as central vehicles of propaganda in nearly every communist nation. In this book, Mary Ginsberg offers the first truly global survey of the history and variety of communist poster art. This collection showcases an extrardinary variety of communits art from the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Eastern Europe, with individual essays by experts in these areas. Beautifully arrayed, the posters in this collection offer a comprehensive look at the broad range of visual works that have both expressed and fueled one of the most powerful political ideas of the modern era. -
For Home and Country
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ISBN: 9780803224742Publication Date: 2010-07-01World War I prompted the first massive organized propaganda campaign of the twentieth century. Posters, pamphlets, and other media spread fear about the "Hun", who was often depicted threatening American families in their homes, while additional campaigns encouraged Americans and their allies to support the war effort. With most men actively involved in warfare, women and children became a special focus -- and a tool -- of social manipulation during the war. "For Home and Country" examines the propaganda that targeted noncombatants on the home front in the United States and Europe during World War I. Cookbooks, popular magazines, romance novels, and government food agencies targeted women in their homes, especially their kitchens, pressuring them to change their domestic habits. Children were also taught to fear the enemy and support the war through propaganda in the form of toys, games, and books. And when women and children were not the recipients of propaganda, they were often used in propaganda to target men. By examining a diverse collection of literary texts, songs, posters, and toys, the author reveals how these pervasive materials were used to fight the war's cultural battle. -
Germany and Propaganda in World War I
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ISBN: 9781780768274Publication Date: 2014-08-01Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf, was scathing in his condemnation of German propaganda in World War I, declaring that Germany failed to recognise that the mobilization of public opinion was a weapon of the first order. This, despite the fact that propaganda had been regarded by the German leadership, arguably for the first time, as an intrinsic part of the war effort. In this book, David Welch fully examines German society - politics, propaganda, public opinion and total war - in the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources - posters, newspapers, journals, film, Parliamentary debates, police and military reports and private papers - he argues that the moral collapse of Germany was due less to the failure to disseminate propaganda than to the inability of the military authorities and the Kaiser to reinforce this propaganda, and to acknowledge the importance of public opinion in forging an effective link between leadership and the people. -
Protest!
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Call Number: N72.P6 M385 2019ISBN: 9780691198330Publication Date: 2019-10-29Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms. Spanning continents and centuries, Protest! presents a major new chronological look at protest graphics. Beginning in the Reformation, when printed visual matter was first produced in multiples, Liz McQuiston follows the iconic images that have accompanied movements and events around the world. She examines fine art and propaganda, including William Hogarth's Gin Lane, Thomas Nast's political caricatures, French and British comics, postcards from the women's suffrage movement, clothing of the 1960s counterculture, the anti-apartheid illustrated book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, the "Silence=Death" emblem from the AIDS crisis, murals created during the Arab Spring, electronic graphics from Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution, and the front cover of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Providing a visual exploration both joyful and brutal, McQuiston discusses how graphics have been used to protest wars, call for the end to racial discrimination, demand freedom from tyranny, and satirize authority figures and regimes. From the French, Mexican, and Sandinista revolutions to the American civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and the Women's March of 2017, Protest! documents the integral role of the visual arts in passionate efforts for change. -
Redefining Propaganda in Modern China
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ISBN: 9780429296505Publication Date: 2020-11-19Redefining Propaganda in Modern China builds on the work of earlier scholars to revisit the central issue of how propaganda was understood within the Communist Party system. What did propaganda mean across successive eras? What were its institutions and functions? What were its main techniques and themes? What can we learn about popular consciousness as a result? In answering these questions, the contributors to this volume draw on a range of historical, cultural studies, propaganda studies, and comparative politics approaches. -
Selling the American Way
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Call Number: E814 .B45 2008ISBN: 9780812221190Publication Date: 2010-08-03In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, My America was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life."Selling the American Way examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification. -
Why America Fights
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ISBN: 9780195381351Publication Date: 2009-07-24In "Why America Fights", Susan A. Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls "perception management," from McKinley's war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Her intriguing account ranges from analyses of wartime messages to descriptions of the actual operations, from the dissemination of patriotic ads and posters to the management of newspaper, radio, and TV media. When Woodrow Wilson carried the nation into World War I, he created the Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel, who called his job "the world's greatest adventure in advertising." In World War II, Roosevelt's Office of War Information avowed a "strategy of truth," though government propaganda still depicted Japanese soldiers as buck-toothed savages. After examining the ultimately failed struggle to cast the Vietnam War in a favorable light, Brewer shows how the Bush White House drew explicit lessons from that history as it engaged in an unprecedented effort to sell a preemptive war in Iraq. Yet the thrust of its message was not much different from McKinley's pronouncements about America's civilizing mission. Impressively researched and argued, filled with surprising details, "Why America Fights" shows how presidents have consistently drummed up support for foreign wars by appealing to what Americans want to believe about themselves.
Suggested websites:
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A Brief History of Anti-Immigrant PropagandaFrom the Immigrant Archive Project
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Demonizing the Enemy: The Graphics of Revolution and War Iranian Poster ArtsFrom the University of Chicago Library
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Digital CollectionsFrom the Library of Congress
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The History and Future of Dietary Guidance in Americafrom the journal Advances in Nutrition
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The Posters That Sold World War I to the American PublicFrom Smithsonian Magazine. A vehemently isolationist nation needed enticement to join the European war effort. These advertisements were part of the campaign to do just that
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Powers of PersuasionOnline exhibit from the National Archives. Discusses Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms.
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Religious Propaganda in IranFrom the United States Commission On International Religious Freedom
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U.S. Department of Arts and CultureThe U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is building a world where every cultural organizer feels connected to and recognizes their critical role in a vibrant movement for liberatory change.
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War Programming: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq WarFrom the journal Sociological Quarterly
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Why We Fight: A Study of U.S. Government War-Making PropagandaFrom the journal Independent Review
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WWII Posters Aimed to Inspire, Encourage ServiceFrom the U.S. Department of Defense.
Propaganda Posters
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