A Negro Community Works In Behalf Of Its Families

This booklet is the first in a series of American Family stories designed to help build total victory in terms of the homes and needs of every family during the difficult times of World War II.

This fascinating compilation of reference entries documents the unique relationship between mass media, propaganda, and the U.S. military, a relationship that began in the period before the American Revolution and continues to this day—sometimes cooperative, sometimes combative, and always complex. The Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America brings together a group of distinguished scholars to explore how war has been reported and interpreted by the media in the United States and what effects those reports and interpretations have had on the people at home and on the battlefield. Covering press–U.S. military relationships from the early North American colonial wars to the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this two-volume encyclopedia focuses on the ways in which government and military leaders have used the media to support their actions and the ways in which the media has been used by other forces with different views and agendas. The volumes highlight major events and important military, political, and cultural players, offering fresh perspectives on all of America's conflicts. Bringing these wars together in one source allows readers to see how media affected the conflicts individually, but also understand how the use of the various forms of media (print, radio, television, film, and electronic) have developed and changed over the years.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

"How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as Pocketbook Politics dramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.