This chapter examines the innovations of “Liberty Printer” John Holt as well as his heated rivalry with loyalist printer James Rivington. An organ of the Sons of Liberty, Holt’s New-York Journal orchestrated America’s first news distribution service, which publicized British abuses in Boston, helping unite the colonies against a new, common enemy. With the arrival of the British in 1776, Holt would print his newspaper, sporadically, on the run. These wartime issues reveal the chaos of war as well as Holt’s own dire straits as he continued to serve his constituents. In James Rivington, Holt found an equally talented rival. Rivington’s Gazetteer was a modern marvel, which served the Tory cause as fervently as the Journal served the Patriot cause. In examining the parallel lives and prints of Holt and Rivington, this chapter showcases their modern print innovations, elicits a sharper understanding of the role of wartime propaganda, and interrogates the complicated decision of allegiance for Loyalists, Patriots, and the many Americans who remained neutral throughout the duration of the war.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.

The torpedoing of the troop transport SS Tuscania on February 5, 1918, was the U.S. Army’s first mass-casualty event of World War I. Along with dozens of British crew members, 215 American soldiers perished. The disaster sent shockwaves across the United States and led to a scandal in the War Department, as angry families demanded more accurate lists of the living and the dead. Several important reforms came in the wake of the tragedy, including the addition of serial numbers to U.S. Army identification discs (or “dog tags”) and new guidelines for the proper care of personnel rosters. While the military struggled to meet the public’s expectations, propagandists responded to the sinking energetically. “Remember the Tuscania!” instantly became a ubiquitous war cry on the American home front. At the same time, visual messaging linked the Tuscania’s fatalities to a new symbology of wartime death, one built around the motivational figure of the Spartan Mother and the icon of the Gold Star. Largely forgotten today, the sinking of the Tuscania offers a revealing case study in the evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the families from which citizen-soldiers are drawn.

Although Hollywood and the US Department of Defense had previously collaborated in wartime, a post-Vietnam War alliance produced a new type of censorship and propaganda. In both blockbuster films and TV, Hollywood allowed the Pentagon to remove unwanted themes and to affix propagandistic storylines in exchange for borrowing hardware and personnel. Entertainment liaison offices for US armed services regularly meet producers’ requests for expensive military “props” in exchange for script control, a practice quietly carried out on hundreds of Hollywood productions. Only recently through Freedom of Information Act requests has it been revealed how films like The Transformers and Top Gun series feature authentic military aircraft and weapons because the government excised script traces of military war crimes, sexual misconduct, and incompetence. While not formally acts of censorship or propaganda, exacting script approval that sneaks in military public relations has yet to undergo public or Congressional scrutiny.

I have argued in this book that different versions of the American ‘story’ are possible. Some writers will offer a generous and optimistic telling of the story that depicts the rise of the nation from humble beginnings to becoming the most powerful and fairest nation that has ever existed, a nation committed to the highest ideals of an often ill-defined Americanism. Other writers have considered the shortcomings of the American experiment, exposing its manifest flaws and blatant violations of liberal values and basic human rights throughout history. Other stories might be considered utopian in their visions of an inclusive and harmonious nation that will finally overcome invidious differences in ethnicities and cultures to achieve a ‘transnational’ America. The choices of what is written about and how various characters and their actions are described and evaluated will vary; in the end, it’s left to the thoughtful reader to distinguish fact from fiction and substantiated conclusions from mere opinion in order to properly evaluate the merits of the author’s argument. Ignorance or denial of history and passive acceptance of propaganda as fact must be challenged wherever they appear, whether in political discourse or in books written by academics and influential public figures.

This chapter charts the emergence of the printed newspaper, and focuses on the Low Countries where the new genre first thrived. It provides a microhistorical study of transatlantic coverage in the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands for the year 1630, when both enemies had good and bad news from the Americas to digest. Amsterdam corantos eagerly followed developments in Brazil, where forces of the Dutch West India Company captured Pernambuco, the heart of the Atlantic sugar industry, while the Antwerp newspapers, with just as much zeal, covered the impending arrival of the first Spanish treasure fleet from New Spain and Tierra Firme in more than two years. The detailed comparison of two competing newspapers operating in the same linguistic market demonstrates that the partisan press on either side of the border preferred to follow mainly good news that was waiting to happen. Yet, whereas the newspapers in the authoritarian regime of the Southern Netherlands discounted bad news altogether, the ‘free press’ in Amsterdam covered all stories arriving from across the Atlantic Ocean, thus setting a new standard of credibility that would be replicated in other European media landscapes.

The introduction takes the reader straight to the heart of Cold War football, beginning in 1979 with the defection to the West of East German superstar Lutz Eigendorf, killed four years later in a car accident that may, or may not, have been caused by communist secret police ‘Stasi’ agents who tracked his every move. It then discusses another, altogether friendlier East–West encounter in the same year, between East German side FC Magdeburg and AFC Wrexham. These twin stories provide the framework for an opening discussion of football’s rich and varied role in the defining conflict of the twentieth century, the Cold War. The introduction finishes with brief tasters of the ten matches that will be studied in the book.

This essay details how the author’s vocation as a writer and reader was awakened by the admiration he felt in his youth for Alejo Carpentier’s literature. That same admiration led to discovering Carpentier’s alienation from the Cuban regime, his role as a censor and a censored individual, and his tendency to adapt what he wrote to fit the ideological demands of the moment. Even though the political environment ended up conditioning readings of Carpentier, the author of this essay describes how he learned to strike a balance between admiration and criticism, acknowledging Carpentier’s complexity as a literary figure.

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

Across the nation, children were urged to become “soldiers of the soil,” members of the United States School Garden Army, an initiative created in February 1918 by the US Bureau of Education to promote local gardening. Federal authorities urged local communities to feed themselves while the United States fed the Allies and other nations dependent on the US food supply. The more food civilians grew, the better the United States could feed the world. Children thus became part of a large pool of unpaid labor, serving the interests of both politicians and educationalists: as youth helped to increase food production, they learned skills and habits of self-reliance. Through the United States School Garden Army, children hooverized and learned to change their diet and eat with moderation. Gardening taught them the meaning of sacrifice.

Early-twentieth-century empire soaked into European culture. That occurred via new visual media and other imaginative means: cinema, photography, and popular press; zoos, trade fairs, and colonial exhibitions; postcards and advertisements; colonial commodity consumption; memoirs, travelogues, and exploration; quality literature and popular fiction. Europe’s relations with exotically faraway, excitingly wealth-producing, aesthetically enticing, but threatening overseas worlds saturated identity and national character. Europeans knew themselves via their racially “othered” colonized populations, who enabled a vivid topography of the imagination. Resulting languages of difference and belonging delivered many resources for individual and collective self-understanding. Cultural media were legion: mass-circulation fictions and recognized novels; children’s comic books; polar expeditions and Central Asian exploration; new Black sporting celebrity; Negrophilia surrounding Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “Race” acquired many sinister applications, from social Darwinism and eugenics to the hardening of the “color line.” The most aggressively elaborate version was the Nazis’ racial state.

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.