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Samuel Stouffer, a little-known sociologist from Sac City, Iowa, is likely not a name World War II historians associate with other stalwart men of the war, such as Eisenhower, Patton, or MacArthur. Yet Stouffer, in his role as head of the Army Information and Education Division’s Research Branch, spearheaded an effort to understand the citizen-soldier, his reasons for fighting, and his overall Army experience. Using empirical methods of inquiry to transform general assumptions about leadership and soldiering into a sociological understanding of a draftee Army, Stouffer perhaps did more for the everyday soldier than any general officer could have hoped to accomplish. Stouffer and his colleagues surveyed more than a half-million American GIs during World War II, asking questions about everything from promotions and rations to combat motivation and beliefs about the enemy. Soldiers’ answers often demonstrated that their opinions differed greatly from what their senior leaders thought soldier opinions were, or should be. Stouffer and his team of sociologists published monthly reports entitled “What the Soldier Thinks,” and after the war compiled the Research Branch’s exhaustive data into an indispensible study popularly referred to as The American Soldier . General George C. Marshall was one of the first to recognize the value of Stouffer’s work, referring to The American Soldier as “the first quantitative studies of the . . . mental and emotional life of the soldier.” Marshall also recognized the considerable value of The American Soldier beyond the military. Stouffer’s wartime work influenced multiple facets of policy, including demobilization and the GI Bill. Post-war, Stouffer’s techniques in survey research set the state of the art in the civilian world as well. Both a biography of Samuel Stouffer and a study of the Research Branch, Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey illuminates the role that sociology played in understanding the American draftee Army of the Second World War. Joseph W. Ryan tracks Stouffer’s career as he guided the Army leadership toward a more accurate knowledge of their citizen soldiers, while simultaneously establishing the parameters of modern survey research. David R. Segal’s introduction places Stouffer among the elite sociologists of his day and discusses his lasting impact on the field. Stouffer and his team changed how Americans think about war and how citizen-soldiers were treated during wartime. Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey brings a contemporary perspective to these significant contributions.

This article analyzes and narrates the history of a clandestine propaganda project known as the Loyal African Brothers series. At the height of the Cold War, African leaders of public opinion received unsolicited leaflets from a group styled the Freedom for Africa Movement (FFAM). Addressed to ‘our Loyal African Brothers,’ the leaflets decried Communist penetration of Africa by connecting topical regional and global events with local histories meant to resonate with an African readership. Unknown to the recipients was that the leaflets were in reality a fabrication of the British Foreign Office’s clandestine propaganda arm, the Information Research Department. Examining the content and distribution of the series, this article uses newly declassified documents to situate Loyal African Brothers within a global ecosystem of Cold War propaganda, decolonization, and print culture. In doing so, it positions Africa as a key battleground in the cultural front of the Global Cold War.

Britain's post-war interventions in former colonial territories remain a controversial area of contemporary history. In the case of India, recent releases of official records in the United Kingdom and South Asia have revealed details of British government anti-communist propaganda activity in the subcontinent during the Cold War period. This article focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It specifically examines the 1960s: a time between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, when IRD operations peaked. The Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China, but cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain's propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence, and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one focused on Communist China, and declared to the Indian government; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviets. In this context, Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India.

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

The history of censorship, propaganda and media during the Cold War has generated a number of different currents and sub-fields, though the interdisciplinary work necessary for the field has not developed as vigorously as it should have. This book starts with a quick sketch of Britain's news strengths and weaknesses in the years preceding the Cold War, and explores the creation and maintenance of a Cold War consensus and borders of acceptable discourse. It then investigates the creation and operation of the main covert propaganda agency, the Information Research Department, and three cases in depth: the denigration of the Soviet-backed peace movement, use of Soviet defectors in propaganda and the campaign to expose the USSR's system of forced labour. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in the book is provided.

This chapter addresses the year 1955, just after the thaw following Joseph Stalin's death but before the Anglo-French debacle at Suez, which led to a revamping of Britain's global propaganda strategy. The traditional role of London as a centre for world news allowed British propaganda to fit more or less unobtrusively into existing channels, to be more likely to be accepted as legitimate news and thus influence the creation of common sense overseas. Finally, the fact-based propaganda of the Information Research Department and its cool, detached tone blended well into the Anglo-American journalistic tradition of facticity and objectivity. In the interest of propaganda, the British Foreign Office had eroded national media barriers based on routine and tradition, subsidised international news on hard-to-find topics and encouraged international media connections that served its interests.

David Streatfield and Daphne Rodwell of the National Foundation for Educational Research describe the setting up of a briefing service to industry about developments in education

The IRD depended on networks of information officers, information bureaucrats, clients, literary agents, feature syndicates, broadcasters and scoop-hungry journalists to discreetly get its propaganda to the desired markets. Almost nothing went to the reading and listening public directly from the IRD. It all filtered through something. At the most straightforward level the IRD material went through the other channels of the government information machinery. This preserved the IRD’s anonymity while allowing it to operate with relatively low overhead costs. The IRD also developed contacts with journalists, news services, feature syndicates, book publishers and, of course, the BBC. In many ways

As world war segued into an uneasy peace in 1945 the Soviet Union was the wild card in international politics. The outside world had tremendous difficulties in establishing even the most basic facts about life in the USSR. Yet this country had become a military titan and political superpower whose nature and intentions concerned much of the world, especially the victorious, precarious British Empire. The British diplomatic elite initially believed they could peacefully coexist with the Stalinist state, despite serious doubts among the chiefs of staff. But British tactics designed to maintain status and to secure American support, coupled with