What Americans were asked to believe, checked against the record

American Propaganda reads United States government, wartime, and domestic campaigns, and it links each catalog image back to the FRAME archive.

What this site is

American Propaganda is a reading of campaigns aimed at people in the United States, or run by the United States government: recruiting and bond drives, wartime information offices, election print, and the domestic programs that asked citizens to watch one another. It is a sibling of the FRAME archive at propagandaarchive.org, not a copy of it. FRAME keeps the worldwide collection and tags each object by technique. This site takes the American slice and asks a different question: what did the appeal demand of a free people, and did the demand respect the Constitution?

The perspective is pro-American, pro-Constitution, and libertarian. That is a point of view, and it is not a permission slip. Where a poster told the truth, the page says so. Where a president, a bureau, or a newspaper was wrong, the page says that too. Voluntary pledges are not the same thing as a statute that jails a speech. A declared war is not a blank check, and neither is a peacetime press office.

Where the facts come from

Catalog images stay on propagandaarchive.org. An essay about an archive object links to that page under the words "Full record at propagandaarchive.org," and it does not add a NARA identifier the archive does not print. A program page that is not an archive object says so, and it cites the government release or the study named in its source list. Quotes stay verbatim.

The prose is new. Titles, headings, and the order of sections are not FRAME's. The editorial rule, with examples, is in About and method and in STYLE.md in the project repository.

What is in this edition

This edition includes the wartime and domestic essays already on the site and these topic hubs: US presidential campaign print, 1800–1900, Liberty Loans, the CPI and the World War I home front, anti-Japanese propaganda, anti-Nazi propaganda, Office of War Information posters, Four Freedoms posters, World War II war bonds and war stamps, rationing and price control, 1941–1947, US public health messaging, 1917–1969, Jim Berryman's Evening Star cartoons, 1928–1963, U.S. Information Agency posters abroad, US and UN Command messaging in the Korean War, 1950–1953, US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969, civil defense and the atomic age, 1945–1969, US Vietnam War messaging, 1954–1975, and US COVID-19 public health campaigns and messaging (2020–2022). A map and timeline filters the FRAME history map to United States items. Administration essays read the Wilson, Roosevelt, and Trump governments as a whole. What is still unwritten is listed in TODO.md.