Collections and standard works
Where the archive comes from, what the entries cite, and how rights are recorded.
The collections
Every item in the archive names its holding institution, the institution's identifier for the item, the license under which it is reproduced, and a link to the catalog record. Items with an unclear rights status are not published. Each institution below has a page in the archive listing the items drawn from it.
- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division: the World War I and World War II poster collections, the Yanker collection, and the WPA posters. Most items carry a "no known restrictions" advisory, recorded here as public domain. Website
- National Archives (NARA) Record Group 44, the Office of War Information, and captured foreign records. Works of the United States government are in the public domain. Website
- Imperial War Museums The First and Second World War poster collections. Items are used under the IWM non-commercial license or where Crown copyright has expired. Website
- Wellcome Collection Public health posters and pamphlets, most released under CC BY or CC0. Website
- Hoover Institution Library and Archives The poster collection, in particular Soviet, German, and Cold War material, used where the item is in the public domain. Website
- Other collections Wikimedia Commons where the underlying institution has released the file, university digital collections, and items whose institution is named in the item's own sources.
The standard works
The technique entries lean on a small shelf of books, cited on each page that uses them. The ones cited most often are below; the reading list has the full shelf with notes.
- Institute for Propaganda Analysis, "How to Detect Propaganda," Propaganda Analysis 1, no. 2 (1937), and Lee and Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda (1939): the seven techniques and their first classroom treatment.
- Jowett and O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (7th ed., 2019): the standard textbook.
- Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965): propaganda as a social condition rather than a set of messages.
- Cialdini, Influence (1984, rev. 2021), and Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda (2001): the psychology the techniques exploit.
- Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (2002); Taylor, Munitions of the Mind (3rd ed., 2003); Cull, Culbert, and Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion (2003): the history.
- Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt (2010); Tye, The Father of Spin (1998); Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (1996): industry and public relations.
- Wardle and Derakhshan, Information Disorder (Council of Europe, 2017), and Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda (2018): the digital-era techniques.
Fallacies and biases
Where an entry names the fallacy or the cognitive bias behind a technique, it links to the entry on logicalfallacies.org, which carries its own sources.