On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine. Many historians have focused on the role of the "yellow press" (sensationalist newspapers so named because they waged cutthroat circulation battles over comic strips like the popular "Yellow Kid") in stirring up sentiment that propelled the U.S. into its first imperialist war. This editorial in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, from February 17, 1898, pointedly blamed Spain for the sinking of the Maine, providing an example of how the "yellow press" covered the incident.

The U.S. government rarely used the word propaganda during World War II when referring to its extensive use of radio, film, newspapers, posters, and leaflets to bolster public support for the war effort. It preferred, instead, terms like "education and information," "psychological warfare," or "morale building." Under whatever rubric, U.S. government media production during World War II was a massive and expensive undertaking. Politicians, public relations experts, and social scientists increasingly heralded film as the ideal medium for domestic propaganda, especially because of the increasing number of sixteen-millimeter projectors in schools, civic centers, and military training facilities. In a 1942 memo on film and propaganda, Eric Knight, a writer in the U.S. army's Morale Branch, argued that "shaping the mental and moral forces on the home front" was as important as, if not more important than, influencing either enemy or neutral nations.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, settlers spilling into new inland settlements created increased social conflict along with economic opportunity. Those living in the backcountry demanded better political representation in the colonial government, as well as government action to remove Indians from those inland areas. The North Carolina Regulator movement of farmers, tenants, and laborers challenged the government in the 1760s; they accused the coastal elite of corruption and monopolization of government offices. Often settlers found land speculators had already claimed the best lands. Herman Husband, the author of this tract, was the most prominent agitator in the regulator movement. A man of great contradictions, he held land grants of over 8000 acres yet also advanced new democratic ideas in his writings. In this pamphlet he challenged the undemocratic basis of Carolina's government and urged his fellow backcountry residents to vote out their corrupt representatives.

George Robert Twelve Hewes, a Boston shoemaker, participated in many of the key events of the Revolutionary crisis. Over half a century later, Hewes described his experiences to James Hawkes. When Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, colonists refused to allow cargoes of tea to be unloaded. In the evening of December 16, with Hewes leading one group, the colonists dressed in "the costume of a Indian." They boarded the ships in Boston harbor and dropped the tea overboard. Hewes' account shed light on how resistance became revolution. The"Boston Tea Party," as it became known in the 19th century, became a powerful symbol of the Revolution. And Hewes, artisan and ordinary citizen, was celebrated as a venerable veteran of the struggle for Independence.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. "Der Sufferegetsky," a Yiddish suffrage song, illustrates yet another medium used in the campaign for women's enfranchisement. In the lyrics, a female suffragist imagined the days when women would be treated like people and men would do the cooking. Her male interlocutor glumly predicted that emancipated women would mistreat men. [English translation follows Yiddish.]

In the 1920s, advertisements sought to create consumer demand by manufacturing new wants. Some advertisements associated products with a desirable lifestyle, while others, like this 1928 cigarette advertisement, made use of celebrity endorsements. Here, aviator Amelia Earhart, the first woman to successfully fly solo across the Atlantic, testifies to the pacifying virtues of Lucky Strikes. Although advertisers suggested that everybody needed the latest of everything, most families set their own priorities and purchased the things they wanted most.

In November 1917 the second phase of the Russian revolution unfolded, as communists led by V. I. Lenin took power. Although deeply disturbing to President Woodrow Wilson and other western leaders, the Bolsheviks promised a far-reaching social transformation that appealed to downtrodden peoples around the world. This cartoon was one of a series by Alfred Freuh in the radical weekly Good Morning that celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution's impact on Russia's aristocracy: Count Parasitsky will not occupy his palatial residence in the mountains this summer

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. Many took pains in their presentation to convey an aura of authenticity--contestants chosen from ordinary walks of life pondered fact-based questions inside sound-proof isolation booths that insured they received no outside assistance. To guarantee against tampering prior to airtime, bank executives and armed guards made on-air deliveries of sealed questions and answers said to be verified by authorities from respected encyclopedias or university professors. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended; however, one survey showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, contestant Herbert Stempel described the process through which every detail of the seemingly spontaneous battle of wits was, in fact, scripted, rehearsed, and acted for dramatic effect.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. A great deal of the American public's outrage was generated by media coverage--newspapers and the emerging film industry--of the incident. The Biograph Company renamed its film The Battleships "Iowa" and "Massachusetts" the Battleships "Maine" and "Iowa," and immediately released it to theaters. It played to cheering audiences. Newspapers, like those published by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, were even more influential in stirring American public opinion into a frenzy over the sinking of the Maine. In contrast to more sensational accounts of the Maine explosion, the staid New York Times cautiously reported on February 17, 1898, that there "was no evidence to prove or disprove treachery" as a factor in the sinking of the battleship.

This landscape and environmental planning workshop investigates and propose a framework for the enhancement, development and preservation of the natural and cultural landscape of the Cardener River Corridor in Catalunya Spain. The workshop is carried out in conjunction with the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and the Barcelona Provincial Council (DiputaciĚ_ de Barcelona).

In addition to providing the public with an abundance of affordable consumer goods during the 20th century, the service sector of corporate America also began to invade and interfere with the private lives of many of its customers. Not content to advertise in print, radio, and television outlets, corporations and their investigative subsidiaries collected information in order to more efficiently target their products to interested buyers. (With the advent of the Internet, corporate consumer information gathering has grown even more sophisticated.) Just how much of an annoyance this could be to the average consumer was documented in the following article about maternity and baby products in the 1950s, the peak years of the "baby boom." During this period, the nation's birthrate rose substantially as economic security became more widespread and Americans on average got married earlier and had healthier children than before. The report described how friends, neighbors, delivery personnel, and laboratory technicians were all suspected of selling the names, addresses, and other vital statistics of prospective parents of "boomers" to marketers. By including men as advertising targets along with women, the author acknowledged a changing role for fathers in the "modern" family.

Research and development scientists at Bell Laboratories introduced a device in 1947 that heralded a technological revolution with widespread consequences for consumers, industry, and the armed forces: the tiny transistor. Replacing the vacuum tube as the basic component for a host of electronic products, this semi-conductor solid-state device and such later developments in electronics as the integrated circuit, lasers, fiber optics, and digitization techniques, allowed the miniaturization of conveniences as with radios and computers, and made possible many aspects of present-day life and work--from telecommunications to automated factory operations. The following Collier's article from 1954, by renowned World War II reporter and novelist Cornelius Ryan, dubbed the new science "Stereatronics" and predicted revolutionary changes in the offing. Though the name did not survive the times in which it was coined, the electronics industry it described would soon become the largest manufacturing industry in the United States.

Rather than call for the creation of federal relief programs, this 1931 advertisement placed by the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief opts for local voluntary charity as a response to the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover firmly believed that relief was a local responsibility, although even this step, which proved inadequate, went further than pre-World War I presidents, who stood by passively during financial panics. Few Americans expected the government to take drastic action when the Depression struck. Many turned instead to their employers, merchants, churches, landlords, and local banks, as well as to family networks, for assistance. As the Depression and unemployment deepened, however, it became clear that the moral capitalism" of marketplace institutions was drastically inadequate and aggressive government action was needed."

Although middle- and upper-class observers viewed the leisure habits of working-class women with condescension, few of them actually knew much about what working women did with their spare time. One exception was Dorothy Richardson, a woman from a middle-class Iowa family who had to work in a factory to support herself. In 1905, she published a fictionalized version of her experiences under the title, The Long Day . In this excerpt, she described a discussion among her fellow workers about their favorite novels and music. Despite her disdainful view of their interest in "ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal . . . cheap story books," her account demonstrated the importance of popular culture in the everyday lives of women factory workers. The novel that the women discussed, Little Rosebud's Lovers, was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a bestselling author of popular fiction. Libbey was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Drawing on domestic traditions of parlor plays and dramatic tableaux, suffragists used brief plays and monologues to enliven their own meetings and to enlist new members through performances at women's clubs and community theaters. Marie Jenney Howe wrote this Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman's Suffrage Party and other suffrage organizations. In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City's Greenwich Village.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. Suffragists also reached large audiences through newspapers. In Alice Duer Miller's "Unauthorized Interviews," originally published as newspaper columns in the New York Tribune, the pro-suffrage writer spoofed male legislators with clever reversals of gender stereotypes: the men were petulant and irrational, while the women suffragists remained cool and logical.

Rising immigration and increasing social stratification affected the development of American cities during the mid-nineteenth century. City guides, delineating the mysteries of the metropolis, as well as newspapers, magazines, and novels presented the East's industrializing cities New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as fractured societies. According to these publications, each was really two cities: one orderly, prosperous, and bathed in sunlight

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. By April, 1898, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine. Most historians have focused on the role of sensationalist newspapers in fomenting public support for U.S. entry into war with Spain, and perhaps even causing it by deliberately misleading the American public about the Maine explosion. But not all newspapers engaged in sensationalist coverage of the incident. This New York Times editorial, dated February 17, 1898, sounded a note of caution about blaming the Spanish government for the explosion.

Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. But the FTP's mandate proved fragile. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in May 1938, one of its first targets was the FTP, which it labeled a subversive organization. When FTP director Hallie Flanagan testified before HUAC in December 1938, she fought back against these attacks. But the FTP still fell victim to the Congressional cuts.

In the 1960s, lottery-like contests designed to publicize products through sweepstakes competitions spread rapidly. In the 19th century, every state banned lotteries--defined as competitions in which chances to win prizes were sold÷to protect citizens. In 1868, Congress prohibited the distribution of lottery materials through the mail. The mid-20th century sweepstakes, however, did not require contestants to purchase tickets or products to win prizes and were thus considered legal. In 1966, the number of national sweepstakes exceeded 600 and consumer groups accused them of deceptive practices. An FTC investigation in 1968 into sweepstakes from oil companies and supermarket chains found evidence of deception. In the following testimony to Congress in 1969, two executives representing firms that conducted large promotional sweepstakes defended them as fair and beneficial to consumers. Congress failed to pass a regulatory bill that year, and by 1998, the FTC estimated that more than 400 million sweepstakes flooded the mail annually and that consumers lost more than $40 billion each year through sweepstakes and telemarketing scams. In 1999, Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act. Among other consumer protections, this Act required sweepstakes materials to clearly state odds of winning, value of prizes, and rules.