Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
1media/main_900.jpg2017-11-19T20:26:32-08:00David Rabkin46f0cc23072c5de550b47b8db5b90a74fd6323e5265102Intro Pageplain2017-12-07T18:36:57-08:00David Rabkin46f0cc23072c5de550b47b8db5b90a74fd6323e5Propaganda is a way of manipulating media to broadcast a message to a wide variety of people with the hope of influencing their opinion on a subject that will support the country and major government decisions. During wars it is important to have the country’s support. There is no better example of war time propaganda than that of WWII. The propaganda was very interesting in that there were many common themes between most of the propaganda during the war those being nationalism, and pride. There are common recurring symbols used throughout wartime propaganda. During WWII these common themes were Hitler and the Nazis. The way propaganda between different countries differ however is in the way that these figures and symbols are portrayed. Propaganda was used during WWII in America to rally the entire country behind the war effort. There was a unifying voice and people were grouped as a whole nation rather than much smaller groups. These unified people were then given a goal and a target and encouraged to help by any means they could. The goal was to win the war and the target was the Germans, more specifically Hitler and the Nazis. In Germany however, the Nazi’s used propaganda to rally their people and to make Hitler appear as a god, a leader, and someone that will ultimately better the world. The way the rest of the world portrayed Hitler was as a villain, a fool, and lesser than the average person. While Nazi propaganda was mostly focused on an individual American propaganda was focused on the people and building up a nation by their values and ideals to protect the world and their country. It stands to reason that rallying nationalism to unite a nation as a whole rather than an individual is the stronger methodical use of propaganda. This exhibit will analyze popular propaganda posters used during WWII in both America and Germany. It will discuss the differences in methodology key points and themes and overall portrayal of a nation based on their posters.