Frontiers of Research is an English-language U.S. Information Agency photo poster in National Archives Record Group 306 (NAID 6949269), catalogued March 26, 1969 and printed as a supplement to Free World magazine.
What the sheet prints
Four photographs fill the square: a scientist bent over a microscope, a child working a teaching machine, a patient lying under a scanner, and researchers among greenhouse plants. Three captions sort them into science and education, medicine, and the peaceful atom. Two paragraphs of body copy carry the argument.
FRONTIERS OF RESEARCH
SCIENCE AND EDUCATION
Each year America spends billions of dollars to study ways and means of reducing or eliminating the ignorance, disease, and poverty which plague a large segment of mankind.
Scattered across continental United States are thousands of public and private scientific research organizations. Although each one has a different specialization and goal, they all share the ultimate aim of seeking and expanding knowledge to enrich life and make this world a better place to live in.
SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE
ATOMS FOR PEACE AND PROGRESS
[in photographs:] STOP STOP; HOT EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
SUPPLEMENT TO FREE WORLD VOL. XIV NO. 3 MARCH 1965
S-496 (12)
Dates and issuer
Two dates attach to this object and they do not agree. The National Archives catalog date is March 26, 1969. The printed line on the sheet itself says it was a supplement to Free World, volume XIV, number 3, March 1965. This page keeps both and does not choose. The issuer is the U.S. Information Agency, filed in the series of posters it distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The archive's title says the English version was handed out in Manila.
How to read it
Nothing on the poster is false on its face. What the copy leaves out is any number, any institution, or any result. "Billions," "thousands," and "a better place to live in" are the whole case. The FRAME record files it under glittering generalities and transfer, two of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in the 1930s: warm words, and prestige borrowed from the white coat and the atom.
The audience matters. This was a federal agency speaking to foreign readers, not to American voters. The sheet itself names no agency. Its only credit is the Free World supplement line, and the FRAME record marks the source as blurred. A reader in Manila could admire American laboratories and still ask who was telling the story, and why.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Frontiers of Research poster (English, distributed in Manila). Issuer: U.S. Information Agency. Catalog date March 26, 1969.
- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, NAID 6949269 (306-PPB-344), retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
