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"A troubling development of the brutal century recently passed has been the growing use of children for war. World War I became the first "total war" of modern times. To engage in war on immense scale authorities believed everyone must participate. That included children. Relentless campaigns of propaganda in both world wars focused special attention on kids. The immense scope of total war grew to dominate children's lives, their daily existence militarized by a world preoccupied by conflict. But we have often ignored wartime contributions of children. What were they expected to do? How were they persuaded to do it? How did it contribute to the war? In what ways did it affect their lives? What did they think about that? This history attempts to respond by examining activities of home-front children in the United States during both world wars. The revised edition considers recent research to extend a discussion of children's experiences in war. It includes an examination of comic books, considers fitness standards, and expands a discussion of Boy Scouts and other groups for children. It also moves the work beyond the United States to consider activities of children in twenty-first century wars, as observers and, tragically, as participants. The fully referenced text should be of interest to students of war and childhood. But it is also written for a general audience interested in how children respond to war. Many Americans experienced war as children, and many others have parents who did. This book is also for them"--

AbstractPolitical elites often employ propaganda to affect the behavior of a particular social group by altering its members' social identities. The empirical literature has demonstrated that this kind of 'identity propaganda' is generally effective at mobilizing citizens. However, while the consequences of being exposed to propaganda depend on its content, we know little about which factors shape propaganda content. To gain insight into the determinants of propaganda content, I analyze a game-theoretic model where a political elite proposes a new identity norm, and citizens affirm or reject it. I demonstrate that, in equilibrium, the propagandist exploits his agenda-setting power to design effective identity norms. I also show that more demanding identity norms can emerge when citizens' mobilization costs are higher, or the propagandist can cheaply allocate material incentives. By contrast, the nature of strategic interaction among citizens has an ambiguous effect on identity norms.

International audience ; In general, the concept of propaganda refers to a method as well as the symbolic object mobilized by it. Propaganda equally constitutes a particular type of communication that involves not only the mobilization of objects, but also of discourse, places, acts, and rituals. This essay employs the writings of Max Weber, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Ellul, and Jacques Rancière to analyze propaganda as a particular type of symbolic political dispositif linked to a specific performance and utterance context. I examine humanitarian songs as a propagandatool in democracy, and show the conditions and the limits of their mobilization through their contextualization. I argue that the link between music and propaganda could be defined as the willingness of a particular power or organized opposition to control the symbolic and emotional dimension of musical works. Through giving the music a meaning in this way, they try to impose a certain social order or to invalidate other possible political configurations of reality. I discuss the contradiction between the specific polysemy of musical works and the fictional construction of reality produced by propaganda, and conclude that the political dimension of music should not necessarily be reduced to the propaganda dispositif. These musical works require consideration of the possibilities offered through fiction in contexts of specific representation, as well as the political dimension of collaborative musical practices.

"Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or ""Fake news"" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a ""post-truth"" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics."