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Celia Malone Kingsbury. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. 326 pp.
Formed in 1917, the Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee) is often cited as ushering the dawn of modern wartime propaganda. World War I was the first conflict sold to the American public using the techniques of the modern public relations campaign. The Creel Committee, the central hub of official wartime communications, saturated all media simultaneously with a consistent narrative designed to rally the public. While this general historical point is often repeated, the specifics of the message set in motion by the Creel Committee is less frequently visited. Celia Malone Kingsbury takes up this task in her book For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front. While her stated focus is the media campaigns of all the major belligerent nations, Kingsbury primarily documents wartime messages packaged for American consumption during WWI (and secondarily, those in Britain). Her real goal-and scholarly contribution-is to highlight the centrality of women, children, and the family in the propaganda of "the Great War." As she writes, "Women, and by extension children, play an essential role in propaganda as subjects and as targets" (9). She traces her theme in a truly interdisciplinary fashion, reminding readers that wartime jingoism did not solely flow from the state; rather, a massive civil society effort emerged, encompassing all facets of popular culture, which took on a life of its own. She traces wartime deployments of domesticity through popular literature, state-commissioned posters, sheet music, cookbooks, children's stories, as well as through unmined artifacts of...