A week after his April, 1917, declaration of war on Germany, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a propaganda agency that used sophisticated mass-marketing techniques to sell the war and the sacrifices it would entail to a wary American public. The CPI distributed 75 million pamphlets, placed magazine ads, produced films, and sent out 75,000 speakers to give short, pro-war speeches. As part of this war mobilization effort, the government also relied on the power of effective, if often fantastic, imagery to shape public opinion. Even though most illustrators and editorial cartoonists eagerly produced pro-war work, the government instituted a Bureau of Cartoons, which issued a weekly Bulletin for Cartoonists. The bulletin included suggestions about appropriately patriotic themes and, in some cases, instructions for specific pictures. This dramatically illustrated poster from 1918 urged Americans to purchase Liberty Bonds.

As the depression of the 1870s deepened, demonstrations by unemployed workers took place all over the country. Workers and their allies demanding relief and job programs often were met with official violenceand were treated with hostility by the nation's press. On January 13, 1874 a workers' demonstration in Tompkins Square in New York City was broken up when mounted police moved in, beating demonstrators with clubs.

A worker performs his job for efficiency experts with small lights attached to his arms and hands. This "cyclegraph," a photograph taken by an open-shutter still camera, was invented by time-and-motion specialist Frank Gilbreth to chart workers' movements in mass-production jobs. Gilbreth claimed that the device would help to eliminate useless movement and turn work into a rigid arrangement of "efficient" motions. Many managers embraced this and other techniques for "scientific management" in the early twentieth century to increase productivity by simplifying and standardizing the tasks of workers. Scientific management also gave managers better control over their workforce, since it meant that formerly skilled jobs could be broken into tasks and divided amongst several easily replaceable unskilled workers.

By 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization founded in 1909 to advocate for political and social equality for African Americans, had 91,000 thousand members. From its earliest years, the NAACP lobbied Congress to pass a federal law against lynching, the violent and public murder of African Americans still carried out by mobs in many southern states in the early twentieth century (and indeed into the 1950s). During November, 1922, the NAACP ran this full-page advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers, pressing for passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill. Passed in the House of Representatives by a two-to-one majority, the anti-lynching bill was subsequently filibustered and defeated in the U.S. Senate. Despite the NAACP's vigorous efforts through the 1930s and the introduction of several subsequent anti-lynching bills, the U.S. Congress never outlawed lynching.

Cheap prints depicting current events were in great demand in both England and the colonies. This 1775 British print presented a scene in Edenton, North Carolina. Fifty-one women signed a declaration in support of nonimportation, swearing not to drink tea or purchase other British imports. Boycotts of British goods became a widespread form of protest to the Townshend Duties, enacted in 1767 to tax goods such as paint, paper, lead, glass, and tea when they arrived in America. Abstaining from European products and fashions became a mark of patriotism, and merchants who violated nonimportation were subjected to public ridicule. Tarring and feathering was common, as were attacks on conspicuous symbols of wealth. As this print suggests, ridicule existed on both sides of the Atlantic. The artist treated the Edenton women with scorn, portraying them as ugly, impressionable, and neglectful of their children.

Northerners who expected a swift victory were convinced otherwise by the Union defeat at Bull Run on July 21, 1861, shown in this sketch by Illustrated London News special artist" Frank Vizetelly. Northern illustrated newspapers dispatched "special artists" to cover the war. These artists' sketches

By 1890, 200,000 Chinese immigrants, mostly men, lived in the United States, usually working under harsh and dangerous conditions. Chinese immigrants faced hostility that sometimes spilled over into violence. In 1882 Congress, responding to the demands of white workers, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely restricted immigration by Chinese into the U.S. San Francisco's Chinese community was the largest in the nation in 1890, with 25,833 people. Arnold Genthe's turn-of-the-century photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown provide information about the Chinese community, but his characterizations often convey a distorted and ominous message. Despite its title, this photograph of Ross Alley, taken some time around the Chinese New Year holiday, is significant for depicting the unusual daytime congestion resulting from the seasonal unemployment of many Chinatown workers after the holiday.

As North American colonists, eager for land, spilled over the Appalachian Mountains in the 1750s, British concern and Indian anger over the expansion rose. Sir William Johnson, a migrant from Ireland who had settled in central New York, was a British official with ties to the Iroquois; in 1756 he was appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies. In 1772, after British victory in the Seven Year's War, he wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, describing the abuses of the traders and the Indians' complaints about the settlers. Johnson feared the loss of authority by the established government, and judging of the settlers that "they are in general a lawless sett of People. "

When the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike against the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, President Ronald Reagan waited just three days to fire all 10,000 of the striking federal employees. The President's action transformed every strike in the nation into a union-busting opportunity. The Los Angeles local of PATCO distributed a leaflet with this illustration during the summer and fall of 1981. The leaflet urged other airline and airport workers to support PATCO, warning that the Reagan Administration's suppression of the union would permit the airline companies to force layoffs and contract concessions from all workers in the industry.

Many nineteenth-century labor reformers rejected corrupt political machines like New York City's Tammany Hall, despite the tangible benefits they often presented to working-class citizens in the way of jobs and social services. To protest party machines, New York's Central Labor Union launched an independent labor party in 1886, choosing reformer and author Henry George as their candidate for mayor. During the campaign, many workingmen faced a dilemma when the Catholic Church hierarchy attacked George. As this cartoon from the humor weekly Judge indicates, although the ULP lost the election, the sizeable turnout for George (the figure on the left) showed that many Catholic voters had ignored the denunciations of Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan (the figure on the right).