Propaganda Reading List: Books and Papers Behind the Site

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Four books that cover the ground. Read these and the rest of the list is commentary.

Propaganda and Persuasion Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, 2019 The standard textbook, in its seventh edition: definitions, history, and a method for analyzing a campaign. The site's working definition of propaganda follows it.
The Fine Art of Propaganda Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, 1939 The Institute for Propaganda Analysis's seven devices applied to Father Coughlin's broadcasts. Short, dated in its examples, and still the clearest first lens.
Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda Philip M. Taylor, 2003 From the ancient world to the Gulf War in three hundred pages. The history article on this site follows its periods.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, 2021 The six principles, with the experiments behind them, in the revised edition. The appeals family leans on it throughout.

Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives Peter Paret, Beth Irwin Lewis, and Paul Paret, 1992 The best single volume of poster reproductions with historical commentary; the archive's selection owes it a good deal.
Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin Victoria E. Bonnell, 1997 How the worker, the peasant woman, the leader, and the enemy were drawn, decade by decade. The source for most of the archive's Soviet annotations.
The Commissar Vanishes David King, 1997 Pairs of Soviet photographs, before and after the people in them were removed. The photo-manipulation entry in one book.
The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich Ian Kershaw, 1987 How the leader's image was built and what the public made of it, from the party's own opinion reports.
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War John W. Dower, 1986 Both sides' dehumanizing imagery, side by side, and what followed from it.
Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda Alan Axelrod, 2009 The Creel Committee, the Four Minute Men, and the first state propaganda machine in a democracy.
Wake Up, America! World War I and the American Poster Walton Rawls, 1988 The American posters of 1917 and 1918 with their artists and print runs.

Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, 2001 Social psychology applied to advertising and politics, chapter by chapter, with the experiments.
Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, 2011 The two systems and the biases, from the man who found most of them. The bias links on this site go to logicalfallacies.org, which draws on it.
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes Jacques Ellul, 1965 Propaganda as a condition of modern society rather than a set of messages. Difficult, and the argument the rest of the field answers to.
"How to Detect Propaganda" Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1937 The original article naming the seven devices, in the first volume of Propaganda Analysis. Four pages.

Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2010 How a handful of scientists manufactured doubt on tobacco, acid rain, the ozone layer, and climate, using the same method each time.
The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations Larry Tye, 1998 Torches of Freedom, bacon and eggs, and the man who called his trade the engineering of consent.
PR! A Social History of Spin Stuart Ewen, 1996 Public relations from Ivy Lee to the present, as an industry with a history rather than a set of techniques.
The Cigarette Century Allan M. Brandt, 2007 The industry that invented most of the commercial devices on this site, with the documents.
How to Lie with Statistics Darrell Huff, 1954 The gee-whiz graph and the well-chosen average, in a book still in print after seventy years.

Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising Paul Messaris, 1997 Why pictures persuade without arguing: camera angle, scale, and the things an image can imply but never claim.
How to Lie with Maps Mark Monmonier, 2018 Projection, color, and symbol as arguments, including a chapter on the propaganda map. Third edition.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Edward R. Tufte, 2001 The lie factor and the chartjunk, with the worst offenders reproduced.
Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography Errol Morris, 2011 Fenton's cannonballs and five other photographs, examined until they confess.
Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag, 2003 What war photographs do to the people who look at them. Short.

Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, 2018 The media ecosystem of 2016 measured, with the finding that the structure mattered more than the bots. Read it
Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, 2017 The Council of Europe report that sorted mis-, dis-, and mal-information, and the vocabulary the field has used since. Read it
"The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model" Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, 2016 The RAND paper that named the model: high volume, many channels, no commitment to consistency. Read it
"Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes" Britt Paris and Joan Donovan, 2019 The Data & Society report cataloging the spectrum of manipulated video, from software to a slowed-down clip. Read it
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Ryan Holiday, 2012 A practitioner's account of trading up the chain, from a blog to a network. Read it as evidence.

Propaganda Analysis Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1937 The Institute's monthly bulletin, 1937 to 1942, written for classrooms. The lesson plans on this site descend from it.
Media Literacy in Action Renee Hobbs, 2021 A current textbook for teaching media analysis, with units on propaganda and persuasion.
Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age Renee Hobbs, 2020 How to teach propaganda analysis without teaching cynicism, from the founder of the Media Education Lab.