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Illustration has been an integral part of human history. Particularly before the advent of media such as photography, film, television, and now the Internet, illustrations in all their variety had been the primary visual way to convey history. The comic book, which emerged in its modern form in the 1930s, was another form of visual entertainment that gave readers, especially children, a form of escape. As World War II began, however, comic books became a part of propaganda as well, providing information and education for both children and adults. This book looks at how specific comic books of the war genre have been used to display patriotism, adventure through war stories, and eventually to tell of the horrors of combat--from World War II through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This book also examines how war- and patriotically-themed comics evolved from soldier-drawn reflections of society, eventually developing along with the broader comic book medium into a mirror of American society during times of conflict. These comic books generally reflected patriotic fervor, but sometimes they advanced a specific cause. As war comic books evolved along with American society, many also served as a form of protest against United States foreign and military policy. During the country's most recent wars, however, patriotism has made a comeback, at the same time that the grim realities of combat are depicted more realistically than ever before. The focus of the book is not only on the development of the comic book medium, but also as a bell-weather of society at the same time. How did they approach the news of the war? Were people in favor or against the fighting? Did the writers of comics promote a perception of combat or did they try to convey the horrors of war? All of these questions were important to the research, and serve as a focal point for what has been researched only in limited form previously. The conclusions of the book show that comic books are more than mere forms of entertainment. Comic books were also a way of political protest against war, or what the writers felt were wider examples of governmental abuse. In the post 9/11 era, the comic books have returned to their propagandistic/patriotic roots.

By the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln had transcended the lingering controversies of the Civil War to become a secular saint, honored in North and South alike for his steadfast leadership in crisis. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II, Lincoln was invoked countless times as a reminder of America’s strength and wisdom, a commanding ideal against which weary citizens could see their own hardships in perspective. But as Barry Schwartz reveals in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, those years represent the apogee of Lincoln’s prestige. The decades following World War II brought radical changes to American culture, changes that led to the diminishing of all heroes—Lincoln not least among them. As Schwartz explains, growing sympathy for the plight of racial minorities, disenchantment with the American state, the lessening of patriotism in the wake of the Vietnam War, and an intensifying celebration of diversity, all contributed to a culture in which neither Lincoln nor any single person could be a heroic symbol for all Americans. Paradoxically, however, the very culture that made Lincoln an object of indifference, questioning, criticism, and even ridicule was a culture of unprecedented beneficence and inclusion, where racial, ethnic, and religious groups treated one another more fairly and justly than ever before. Thus, as the prestige of the Great Emancipator shrank, his legacy of equality continued to flourish. Drawing on a stunning range of sources—including films, cartoons, advertisements, surveys, shrine visitations, public commemorations, and more—Schwartz documents the decline of Lincoln’s public standing, asking throughout whether there is any path back from this post-heroic era. Can a new generation of Americans embrace again their epic past, including great leaders whom they know to be flawed? As the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial approaches, readers will discover here a stirring reminder that Lincoln, as a man, still has much to say to us—about our past, our present, and our possible futures.

As there has yet to be any substantial scrutiny of the complex confluences a more sustained dialogue between disability studies and comics studies might suggest, Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives aims through its broad range of approaches and focus points to explore this exciting subject in productive and provocative ways.

Designed by Beveridge and built by Attlee's post-war Labour government, the welfare state was created during the 1940s. Britain has been seen - in domestic debates and internationally - as a world first: the place where both the idea and the practice of the welfare state were invented. I draw together comparative welfare state analysis with law and society scholarship (previously largely developed in isolation from one another) - as well as using British political cartoons as a source - to develop a revisionist historical critique of this conventional wisdom. First, the British welfare state has always been comparatively parsimonious. Second, the idea of the welfare state seems to have its origins outside the United Kingdom and this terminology was adopted relatively late and with some ambivalence in public debate and scholarly analysis. Third, a large body of socio-legal scholarship shows that robust 'welfare rights' were never embedded in the British 'welfare state'.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, millions of theatergoers, students, and industrial workers saw one or more animated short films, shot in Technicolor and running eight to nine minutes, that were designed to build public support for the principles and practices of free enterprise. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation quietly funded the production of this series of cartoons, titled Fun and Facts about American Business, through multiple grants to industrial animation house John Sutherland Productions via Harding College, an evangelical college in rural Arkansas that would become known nationally for its anti-communist and conservative political activism. This article examines the creation and distribution of the Fun and Facts films in the years 1946 through 1952 as a notable case of ephemeral film and as an example of the Cold War public relations movement known as “economic education.” Further, the article examines the consequences of economic education as a conceptual category on the production and distribution of Cold War industrial propaganda.

This article is a study of the 1905-6 world tour undertaken by William Jennings Bryan and his family. Bryan was one of the major US politicians of his era. Three times a Democratic party presidential nominee (1896, 1900, 1908), he played a prominent role in the various reform crusades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was the leading figure on the populist, agrarian wing of his party. To date, however, historians have paid little attention to his extensive travels and voluminous travel writing, in large part because hostile journalists and historians – chief among them Walter Lippmann, H. L. Mencken, and Richard Hofstadter – succeeded in casting him as an archetype of American parochialism. This study makes us aware of Bryan's published and unpublished correspondence, the memoirs of his daughter Grace, newspaper reports, and cartoons to form a reassessment of Bryan, focusing primarily on his encounters with unfamiliar cultures, and with imperialism in the Philippines, British India, and the Dutch East Indies. In so doing, it places Bryan for the first time in a global and transnational frame, and mounts a broader critique of the rigidly regional and national orientation of the US historiography of populism.

Institutionalized forgetting about the scope of the Trotskyist experience in the United States was on display in every venue following the deaths of Peter Rafael Bloch (1921–2008), an authority on Puerto Rican artistic culture, and George Perle (born George Perlman, 1915–2009), a Pulitzer Prize-winning music theorist and composer once married to the sculptress and painter Laura Slobe (1909–58). Nothing written even hinted that the two iconoclasts were in the past highly educated and committed Marxists, or that revolutionary ideas oxygenated their cultural thinking at crucial moments. Alarm over memory loss of this type is the motive for this present essay, which appraises the lives of Bloch, Perle, and Slobe along with other \"Bohemians\" who sought a vexed amalgam of unconstrained cultural creativity, personal freedom, and disciplined \"Bolshevik\" politics in the Socialist Workers Party (swp) during the late 1940s and 1950s. What can be recovered of the political and personal passions of many \"outlaw\" lives on the Left, of cultural revolutionaries and sexual non-conformists, especially from those who infused anti-capitalism with anti-Stalinism, are only fragmentary narratives to be steered warily into coherency. For the postwar decade, one must write a kind of ghostly history, the reconstruction of the presence of an absence in a time of persecution. Institutionnalisée tout en oubliant la portée de l'expérience trotskiste aux États-Unis, une exposition a eu lieu partout à la suite de la mort de Peter Rafael Bloch (1921–2008), une autorité sur la culture artistique portoricaine, et de George Perle (né George Perlman, 1915–2009), un théoricien de la musique, lauréat du prix Pulitzer et compositeur, qui était marié au sculpteur et peintre Laura Slobé (1909–1958). Rien d'écrit a laissé entendre que les deux iconoclastes étaient des marxistes très instruits et engagés, ou que les idées révolutionnaires pénétraient leurs pensées culturelles dans les moments cruciaux. Alarmé par la perte de mémoire de ce genre est l'objectif du présent article, qui évalue la vie de Bloch, Perle, et Slobé ainsi que d'autres « bohémiens » qui cherchaient un amalgame controversé de la créativité culturelle sans contrainte, la liberté personnelle, et la politique bolchevik disciplinée dans le Parti des travailleurs socialistes au cours des années 1940 et 1950. Que peut-on récupérer des passions politiques et personnelles de nombreuses vies « hors la loi » sur la gauche des révolutionnaires culturels et des non-conformistes sexuels, en particulier de ceux qui ont infusé l'anticapitalisme et l'antistalinisme, ne sont que des récits fragmentaires pour être rédigés avec prudence en cohérence. Pour la décennie d'après-guerre, il faut écrire une sorte d'histoire fantomatique, la reconstruction de la présence d'une absence à une époque de persécution.

This article focuses on the dialogues within and between Disney's The Princess and The Frog and a 1930s animated series about a young Black boy—Little Ol' Bosko. Both films feature Black characters who navigate a fairy tale world set in the swamps of southern Jim Crow era America in which they grapple with fears about reductive and demeaning black film stereotypes. Although they are in some ways trapped within the white gaze of the film's meaning, I argue that in their fantasies, both Bosko and Tiana outmaneuver the regime of representation that underlies racial stereotyping, opening a space for trans-coding and revision of its meanings. In addition, a comparison of the films demonstrates a clear improvement from the 1930s in terms of an increased differentiation in the representation of Black Americans, acknowledging, if not embodying, the fact that \"Black America\" is a diverse and complex reality.