Appendix C: Primary Sources Guide

A Researcher's Guide to Archives, Collections, and Documents for Propaganda Studies

Primary sources are the raw material of historical and empirical research. They are the propaganda posters themselves, not the museum catalog entries about them. They are the internal memos tobacco executives wrote to one another, not the journalists' summaries of those memos. They are the declassified operational plans, the court-released industry documents, the archived broadcast recordings, and the datasets of removed influence operation accounts. For students of propaganda, disinformation, and persuasion, primary sources are indispensable — they reveal intent, technique, and context that even the best secondary analysis can obscure.

This guide is designed to be used. Each entry describes what a collection contains, how to access it, and what research questions it can help answer. The sections move from foundational concepts through historical and contemporary archives to practical guidance on analysis, citation, and the ethical challenges that come with this territory.

Section 1: What Is a Primary Source in Propaganda Studies?

Defining Primary Sources in This Field

A primary source is any document, artifact, recording, or dataset that was produced at the time of the event or phenomenon being studied, by a participant in or direct witness to it. In propaganda studies, the category is unusually broad:

  • Propaganda artifacts themselves: posters, pamphlets, radio scripts, films, advertisements, social media posts, memes, and campaign materials produced by propagandists for target audiences
  • Internal industry and government documents: memos, strategy papers, meeting minutes, and communications produced by the organizations running propaganda operations, not intended for public view
  • Government records: legislative history, agency reports, executive orders, Congressional testimony, and classified documents released through declassification or litigation
  • Surveillance and intelligence records: signals intelligence, psychological operations planning documents, after-action reports
  • Platform data: datasets of accounts removed for coordinated inauthentic behavior, ad transparency records, content moderation logs released through regulatory proceedings
  • Personal testimonies: diaries, oral histories, and memoirs from participants — propagandists, target audiences, and resisters alike

Propaganda Artifact vs. Analysis of It

The distinction that matters most: a 1942 U.S. Treasury Department war bond poster is a primary source. An art historian's essay analyzing the visual rhetoric of that poster is a secondary source. Both have value, but they serve different functions. Primary sources let you form your own analysis; secondary sources help you situate your analysis in a broader scholarly conversation.

This distinction can get complicated. A 1940s newspaper editorial endorsing a government propaganda campaign is both a primary source (evidence of how mainstream media responded to wartime messaging) and a secondary account (a journalist's interpretation of events). Context determines how you read it.

Why Primary Sources Matter

Secondary sources — textbooks, journal articles, documentaries — are interpretations. Good ones are accurate and insightful; less careful ones compress, simplify, or reflect the biases of their authors. Primary sources let you check the interpretation against the evidence. In propaganda studies specifically, primary sources often reveal things that polished secondary accounts smooth over:

  • Intent that contradicts stated purpose: Internal tobacco industry documents, for instance, show executives explicitly discussing strategies to manufacture scientific doubt — intent that the companies' public communications vigorously denied.
  • Technique in its raw form: Analyzing an actual propaganda film reveals editing choices, musical cues, and visual grammar that a written description of the film cannot fully capture.
  • Context that reframes meaning: A speech excerpt circulated out of context as disinformation looks different when you can access the full speech, the contemporaneous audience response, and the speaker's subsequent remarks.

The Ethical Dimension

Many primary sources in this field are disturbing. Nazi propaganda films are aesthetically sophisticated and morally repugnant. Cult recruitment videos are designed to be psychologically effective. White supremacist disinformation campaigns contain targeted harassment of real people. Internal documents from opioid manufacturers describe marketing strategies that contributed to mass death.

Approaching these materials analytically does not require emotional detachment — it requires that you maintain the distinction between understanding how something works and endorsing it. Experienced researchers often develop specific practices for this: time-limited exposure sessions, clear framing notes written before and after engaging with difficult material, and deliberate attention to the human cost of the phenomena being documented.

The Internet Archive includes Nazi propaganda films. The UCSF tobacco document archive contains strategies designed to addict and kill people. These are legitimate research materials. The ethical obligation is to handle them with the seriousness that entails.

Section 2: Key Archives and Collections

Historical Propaganda Materials

Library of Congress — Prints and Photographs Division loc.gov/pictures

The LOC holds one of the world's premier collections of American propaganda imagery, with particular depth in World War I and World War II materials. The collection includes thousands of government-commissioned posters, commercial advertising produced in support of war efforts, pamphlets distributed by the Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee), and newsreel footage. The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog is fully searchable by keyword, date, subject, and creator. Many items are in the public domain and available as high-resolution downloads. For film and audio materials, the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division holds an additional archive accessible through reading room visits or advance request.

Most useful for: Visual rhetoric analysis, WWI and WWII American propaganda campaigns, the Creel Committee's domestic messaging operations, war bond campaigns.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archives.gov

NARA is the repository for records of the U.S. federal government. For propaganda researchers, the most valuable holdings include: records of the Committee on Public Information (Record Group 63), records of the Office of War Information (Record Group 208), records of the Office of Strategic Services (Record Group 226), and records of the United States Information Agency (Record Group 306). Declassified documents from the CIA, NSA, and State Department are also accessible here, including psychological operations planning documents from the Cold War era.

The National Declassification Center processes and releases classified records on a rolling basis. NARA's online catalog (catalog.archives.gov) allows keyword and record group searches; many documents have been digitized, though significant holdings still require in-person or duplication requests at College Park, Maryland.

Most useful for: U.S. government propaganda apparatus history, WWII domestic information campaigns, Cold War psychological operations, OSS and early CIA operations.

Imperial War Museum — Collections Online iwm.org.uk/collections

The IWM holds the primary archive of British government propaganda from both World Wars, including materials produced by the War Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House), the Department of Information, and the Ministry of Information. The collection includes posters, films, photographs, personal papers, and oral histories. The Collections Online portal provides free search access with substantial digitized holdings; researchers can request items not yet digitized through the archive reading room in London.

Most useful for: British propaganda technique, comparison of British and American approaches to WWI and WWII messaging, the role of the literary establishment in wartime propaganda (many prominent authors served in information departments).

German Federal Archives — Bundesarchiv bundesarchiv.de

The Bundesarchiv holds extensive collections of materials from the Nazi period, including records of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), documentary films, newsreels (Deutsche Wochenschau), official photographs, and internal party communications. Access policies reflect Germany's legal framework around Nazi materials: researchers with scholarly credentials can access materials that are otherwise restricted. The Bundesarchiv's online portal offers some digitized finding aids; serious archival research typically requires engagement with the institution directly.

A companion resource is the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, which holds the surviving print collection of Nazi-era films including works by Leni Riefenstahl. For English-language researchers, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm.org) has digitized significant portions of relevant materials and provides substantial contextual documentation.

Most useful for: Nazi propaganda apparatus, Goebbels's documented strategy (his diaries are published), film as propaganda, totalitarian information control, post-war denazification communications.

Hoover Institution Library and Archives hoover.org/library-archives

Stanford's Hoover Institution holds one of the largest collections of political propaganda and Cold War materials in the United States. Holdings include Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty records (including internal operational documents and audience research), extensive Soviet and Eastern Bloc propaganda materials, collections from anti-communist émigré organizations, and records of American domestic political campaigns. The Hoover also holds collections of underground ("samizdat") publications from the Soviet bloc — the counter-propaganda of the oppressed.

Most useful for: Cold War information operations, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as case study, Soviet propaganda apparatus, comparison of American and Soviet Cold War messaging.

Industry Document Archives

UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

This is, for propaganda researchers studying the manufacture of doubt, the most important archive in existence. Through litigation beginning in the 1990s, the major American tobacco companies were compelled to release their internal documents — ultimately more than 14 million pages of memos, strategy papers, research reports, correspondence, and presentations produced by Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, Lorillard, and their affiliated research organizations and public relations firms.

These documents are fully searchable at the UCSF Industry Documents Library. Effective search strategies include searching by company name combined with terms like "scientific controversy," "doubt," "denormalization," "youth," or the names of specific campaigns (the Tobacco Institute, the Center for Indoor Air Research). Searching by document type (memo, report, presentation) and date range helps narrow large result sets.

What researchers find here is not theoretical — it is executives and scientists explicitly discussing, in their own words, the strategy of manufacturing scientific uncertainty to delay regulation. The documents provided the empirical foundation for Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt and for much of the academic literature on the "doubt industry." For students, the most instructive starting point is often the "Brown and Williamson Smoking and Health" collection, which includes documents showing explicit awareness of health harms alongside marketing plans targeting young smokers.

The same UCSF portal now hosts several additional document collections released through litigation:

Opioid Industry Documents: Records from Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family entities, and McKinsey & Company released through state attorney general settlements and federal bankruptcy proceedings. These document internal awareness of addiction risks alongside marketing strategies encouraging high-dose prescribing. Available at the same industrydocuments.ucsf.edu portal.

Food Industry Documents: Records from Coca-Cola, sugar industry trade associations, and related organizations documenting campaigns to shape nutrition science and public health messaging. Also hosted at UCSF.

Most useful for: Corporate disinformation as case study, the "merchants of doubt" playbook, third-party front organizations, the relationship between industry-funded science and public messaging.

ExxonKnew — Related Archives exxonknew.org; also via InsideClimate News investigative archive

The "Exxon Knew" documentation refers to a body of evidence showing that ExxonMobil's own internal scientists produced accurate research on anthropogenic climate change in the 1970s and 1980s, while the company simultaneously funded a decades-long public campaign to manufacture uncertainty about climate science. The primary sources here come from multiple streams: documents obtained through state attorney general investigations, materials released by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times through investigative reporting, and records from the American Petroleum Institute.

The Climate Investigations Center (climateinvestigations.org) maintains a searchable database of documents related to climate disinformation campaigns.

Most useful for: Corporate disinformation in the climate context, the gap between private knowledge and public messaging, fossil fuel industry PR strategy.

Government and Policy Documents

FOIA.gov and MuckRock foia.gov; muckrock.com

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives the public the right to request records from federal agencies. FOIA.gov provides centralized access to agency FOIA portals and a reading room of previously released documents. MuckRock is a nonprofit platform that helps journalists and researchers file FOIA requests, tracks pending requests, and publishes released documents — its archive of completed requests is a valuable secondary resource because documents released to one requester become public.

For propaganda and disinformation research, FOIA has produced important disclosures: documents on FBI counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO), State Department records on public diplomacy programs, and Pentagon records on domestic public affairs operations. Processing times are long (often years), and agencies frequently withhold portions of documents under exemptions. For researchers on a deadline, the MuckRock archive of prior releases is often the more practical starting point.

Congressional Research Service Reports crsreports.congress.gov

CRS produces non-partisan policy analysis for members of Congress. Reports are now publicly available and cover topics including foreign disinformation, domestic propaganda law (including the Smith-Mundt Act and its 2012 reform), platform regulation, and national security communications policy. These are secondary sources in themselves but cite primary legislative and regulatory materials and provide excellent legislative history.

FTC Enforcement Records ftc.gov/enforcement

The Federal Trade Commission documents its actions against deceptive advertising and marketing practices in public enforcement records. Case files include the FTC's findings of fact, which often contain detailed analysis of specific deceptive claims and the industry evidence the agency considered. For researchers studying the regulatory history of commercial propaganda and deceptive advertising, FTC records provide a well-organized body of government-documented cases.

Intelligence and Influence Operation Documentation

Senate Intelligence Committee — Report on Russian Active Measures intelligence.senate.gov

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a five-volume report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Volumes I and II (election security and social media influence operations) are fully declassified and publicly available. Volume II provides detailed documentation of the Internet Research Agency's operations, including examples of content produced, targeting strategies, engagement metrics, and the platforms used. This is an essential primary-source-adjacent document: it synthesizes classified intelligence into an unclassified record, with citations to the underlying evidence.

Stanford Internet Observatory Takedown Reports io.stanford.edu/research

The SIO publishes documented analyses of platform-removed influence operation accounts, typically in partnership with the platform conducting the removal. Each report describes the network, its tactics, the content it produced, and the attribution evidence. The SIO's work on Iranian, Chinese, Russian, and domestic influence operations constitutes some of the most rigorous public documentation of contemporary disinformation practice.

Graphika Reports graphika.com/reports

Graphika specializes in network analysis of online influence operations. Their public reports document specific campaigns with network maps, content samples, and methodology descriptions. Particularly valuable for understanding how coordinated inauthentic behavior is detected and characterized.

DFRLab (Digital Forensic Research Lab) atlanticcouncil.org/programs/digital-forensic-research-lab

The Atlantic Council's DFRLab produces documented investigations of disinformation campaigns with particular depth on European, Russian, and Chinese operations. Their "#ElectionWatch" and "#DigitalSherlocks" series provide real-time documented case studies. Report archives are publicly available.

EUvsDisinfo Database euvsdisinfo.eu

Run by the East StratCom Task Force of the European External Action Service, EUvsDisinfo maintains a database of pro-Kremlin disinformation cases with original claims, sources, debunking information, and topic tags. As of 2026 the database contains thousands of documented cases. It functions both as a primary source (documented examples of specific disinformation claims) and as an analytical resource (the task force's characterizations of patterns and techniques).

Broadcast and Film Archives

Internet Archive archive.org

The Internet Archive is the most comprehensive freely accessible repository of historical media. For propaganda researchers, it holds: thousands of U.S. government and military films from WWI through the Cold War; Nazi-era German newsreels (Deutsche Wochenschau) and feature films available for academic analysis; wartime newsreels from Allied nations; Cold War civil defense films; and a Wayback Machine archive of billions of web pages. Search by topic, date, or creator. Many items have been uploaded by archivists and scholars specifically for research purposes.

The Internet Archive also hosts the Prelinger Archives — a collection of ephemeral films donated by film archivist Rick Prelinger — which includes an extraordinary collection of American educational, industrial, and propaganda films from the 1920s through 1980s.

Most useful for: Historical film-based propaganda, comparative analysis across periods, accessing materials otherwise held only in specialized film archives.

UCLA Film and Television Archive cinema.ucla.edu/collections/film-television-archive

One of the largest entertainment archives in the world, the UCLA archive holds materials beyond what the Internet Archive has digitized, including newsreel collections and documentary materials. Researchers can arrange in-person screenings or in some cases request digitization. Particularly strong for mid-twentieth century American television and newsreel content.

National Film Preservation Foundation filmpreservation.org

The NFPF funds preservation of at-risk American films and provides public access to some preserved titles. Its collections include early silent-era propaganda and documentary films not available through other sources.

Social Media and Platform Data

Twitter/X Election Integrity Data transparency.twitter.com (archived)

Twitter published datasets of accounts removed for state-backed information operations, including account metadata, tweet text, and in some cases media files. These datasets, covering operations attributed to Russia, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and other state actors, were released between 2018 and 2023 and remain available through the Internet Archive and through researchers who archived them. They constitute primary-source data for understanding influence operation account behavior, content strategy, and network characteristics.

Meta Transparency Center — Ad Library and CIB Reports transparency.meta.com

Meta's Ad Library provides public searchable access to all active political and issue advertising on Facebook and Instagram, including who paid for the ad, how much was spent, and targeting parameters (in aggregate). The Ad Library API provides programmatic access for researchers. Meta also publishes reports on coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) enforcement actions, which document removed networks with examples of content and attribution reasoning.

YouTube Researcher Data Access Program

YouTube offers a data access program for academic researchers that provides API access to expanded data beyond what is publicly available. Applications require institutional affiliation and IRB approval or equivalent. This program has been the basis for significant academic research on recommendation systems and the spread of political content.

Section 3: How to Analyze a Primary Source

Five Questions to Ask of Any Propaganda Primary Source

1. Who created it, when, and for what intended audience?

Authorship and audience are the foundation of analysis. A poster created by the U.S. War Department for distribution to soldiers on military bases is doing something different from a poster made for display in public transit systems in American cities. A memo written by a tobacco company's law department for internal circulation is operating under different constraints than the company's press releases. Always establish: Who made this? When? Who were they trying to reach?

2. What is the explicit message? What is the implicit message?

Many propaganda materials operate on two levels simultaneously. The explicit message of a wartime recruitment poster might be "Enlist now." The implicit messages might include: war is masculine; men who do not enlist are cowards; the home front is protected by soldiers (implication: women wait). Separating these layers is essential to understanding technique.

3. What techniques are being used?

After establishing what the message is, analyze how it is being delivered. Techniques vary by medium: visual rhetoric in posters (framing, color, symbolic imagery, emotional appeals); repetition and rhythm in radio scripts; editing, music, and visual sequencing in film; network amplification and false consensus effects in social media campaigns. Refer to the typologies introduced in earlier chapters of this textbook.

4. What context does it assume or construct?

Propaganda always makes assumptions about what its audience already believes. A wartime poster that depicts the enemy as a particular kind of monster assumes (and reinforces) a set of prior beliefs about the enemy. Disinformation that claims to reveal a "hidden truth" assumes an audience primed to distrust official sources. Ask: what prior beliefs does this material depend on? What beliefs is it trying to construct or reinforce?

5. What does it reveal about the propagandist's goals, assumptions, and strategies?

This question is especially powerful when applied to internal documents that were not intended for public view. An internal tobacco industry memo debating whether to publicly acknowledge nicotine addiction reveals the propagandists' awareness of the truth they were concealing. A psychological operations planning document that segments a target population into typologies reveals how the propagandist understood — and sought to manipulate — that population.

The Difference Between What a Document Says and What It Reveals

Every document has a surface content and an evidential content. The surface content is what the document is explicitly about. The evidential content is what the document reveals about the context, assumptions, beliefs, and intentions of the people who produced it — often things they did not intend to disclose.

A tobacco industry "crisis communications" memo drafted after early health findings is explicitly about managing media coverage. But it evidentially reveals that executives knew the health findings were credible, that they were primarily concerned with legal liability, and that they had decided in advance to contest the science publicly regardless of what their own scientists found. Learning to read for evidential content is one of the most important skills in archival research.

Working with Translated Materials

Many crucial primary sources — Nazi internal documents, Soviet propaganda materials, contemporary Chinese state media — require translation. Translation introduces interpretation. When working with translated materials, apply additional scrutiny: Who translated it? When? What were their qualifications and possible biases? For key terms, is there an original-language version you can check? Some propagandistically significant terms — the German Volksgemeinschaft, for instance — carry connotations that standard English equivalents flatten.

Where possible, cite the original-language source as well as the translated version, and note the translator.

Section 4: Citing Primary Sources

Different primary source types require adapted citation formats. The examples below follow Chicago author-date style, which is conventional in the social sciences and history; adapt to your discipline's standard.

Government Documents

United States, Office of War Information. The Negro Soldier. Bureau of Motion Pictures, 1944. National Archives, Record Group 208, Entry 566.

Archival Materials (General)

Bernays, Edward L. Letter to Doris Fleischman, March 14, 1924. Edward L. Bernays Papers, Box 12, Folder 7. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

Propaganda Artifacts (Physical)

Flagg, James Montgomery. I Want YOU for U.S. Army. Poster. Washington: United States Army Recruiting Service, 1917. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-9853.

Industry Documents from Litigation Archives (UCSF Format)

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation. "Smoking and Health Proposal." Internal memorandum, August 21, 1969. Brown & Williamson Records, Bates No. 690010951-690010958. Truth Tobacco Industry Documents. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/psdw0147.

Declassified Documents (NARA Format)

Central Intelligence Agency. "Psychological Warfare in Korea: Assessment." Declassified memorandum, February 3, 1953. National Archives, Record Group 263, Entry ZZ-19, Box 11.

Online Sources — Influence Operation Reports

Stanford Internet Observatory. "Unheard Voice: Evaluating Five Years of Pro-Western Covert Influence Operations." Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, August 2022. https://io.stanford.edu/...

Social Media Dataset

Twitter. "Information Operations: September 2019 Disclosure." Dataset. Twitter Transparency Center, September 20, 2019. Archived at Internet Archive.

Online primary sources present a citation stability problem: URLs change, pages are taken down, and platforms alter their transparency portals. Several practices reduce this risk:

  • Wayback Machine: Before citing any online source, save a copy at web.archive.org/save/. Cite both the original URL and the archived URL.
  • Bates numbers: For litigation-released documents in archives like UCSF, the Bates number uniquely identifies each document page regardless of the platform's URL structure. Always include it.
  • DOI or stable identifier: Government reports increasingly carry DOIs or other stable identifiers; use these when available.
  • Archive date: For any web source, record and cite the date you accessed the page.

Section 5: Ethical Considerations

Engaging with Disturbing Primary Sources

Researchers in this field regularly encounter material designed to dehumanize, manipulate, and harm. Nazi propaganda depicting Jewish people as vermin. Cult recruitment videos engineered to exploit emotional vulnerability. White supremacist content containing targeted harassment of real individuals. Opioid marketing materials that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Working with such material is legitimate scholarship, but it carries costs. Some practical principles from experienced researchers:

  • Approach difficult material in structured sessions with clear time limits, rather than in extended immersive viewing.
  • Write a brief orienting note before engaging — a sentence or two stating your analytical purpose — to maintain the frame of analysis rather than unmediated exposure.
  • Attend to the human beings documented in these materials, not only the techniques. The people targeted by harassment campaigns, the communities devastated by engineered addiction, the populations subjected to dehumanizing imagery are not merely illustrative.
  • Discuss difficult material with colleagues or mentors. Isolation in archival work can compound distress.

The Platform-Access Problem

Some of the most important contemporary primary sources exist behind platform API walls that require applications, approval, and ongoing institutional relationships. Access granted can be revoked — Twitter's academic research API, once widely used by disinformation researchers, was shut down following the platform's 2022 ownership change, eliminating a significant source of primary data. Researchers who had already downloaded data retained access to their local copies; those who had not lost the source.

Practical implications: When access to platform data is granted, download and locally preserve any data relevant to your research immediately. Cite both the original platform source and your local archive date. In published research, data availability statements should acknowledge the access limitations.

The Privacy Dimension

Influence operation datasets released by platforms sometimes contain personal data — account information of real individuals who were participants in or targets of operations, messages, and interaction data. Researchers using these datasets have obligations analogous to those in any human subjects research: minimize unnecessary disclosure of personal information, comply with relevant data protection law (GDPR, state privacy laws), and consider whether individuals can be re-identified from published findings.

Ethical review processes (IRB in the U.S., equivalent bodies elsewhere) are increasingly expected for social media data research, even when the data is technically public. If your institution has a research ethics board, consult them before using large-scale platform datasets.

A Note on Starting Your Research

The archives listed in this appendix represent decades of institutional effort to preserve and make accessible materials that power genuinely important scholarship. Many of them are freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The UCSF tobacco documents, the Internet Archive's film collections, the Senate Intelligence Committee reports, the EUvsDisinfo database — these require no institutional affiliation, no credentials, and no fees.

Start there. Read an internal memo, watch a propaganda film, work through a disinformation report. The encounter with primary material — unmediated, in the words and images produced by the propagandists themselves — is where serious research begins. Secondary sources will tell you what scholars have concluded. Primary sources will show you what those conclusions are built on, and will sometimes reveal things that the secondary literature has not yet processed.

The goal of this appendix is not to be exhaustive. It is to give you enough entry points that you can follow any thread in this textbook into the evidentiary record from which it emerged.

For citation formats beyond those covered here, consult The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition), or your institution's preferred style guide. For help with FOIA requests, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press maintains a detailed guide at rcfp.org/open-government-guide.