Further Reading: Chapter 1

Essential Texts

Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. The standard academic textbook on the subject. Chapter 1's working definition draws heavily on their framework. Students who want a comprehensive scholarly treatment should start here. Earlier editions are also useful for tracking how the field has evolved.

Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda. New York: Liveright, 1928. (Public domain; freely available online.) Read the original. It is short (less than 200 pages), clearly written, and deeply revealing. Whatever you think of Bernays's conclusions, the book is an unusually honest account of how organized persuasion actually works, written by one of its foremost practitioners.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. Dense and demanding, but rewards careful reading. Ellul's insight that the most dangerous propaganda is structural — not designed by any individual propagandist — is essential for understanding the digital media environment. Part I ("The Characteristics of Propaganda") can be read independently of the rest.

Lasswell, Harold D. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: Knopf, 1927. (Public domain.) The founding text of propaganda studies as an academic discipline. Written immediately after WWI by a political scientist who had studied the conflict's information campaigns in detail. Lasswell's later work, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936), extends the analysis into broader political theory.

On the History of the Word and Concept

Marlin, Randal. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. 2nd ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013. Particularly valuable for its treatment of the ethical dimensions of propaganda and for its historical survey of how the term has been used across different periods and contexts.

Cunningham, Stanley B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction. Westport: Praeger, 2002. A philosophical examination of the concept. Useful for students interested in the definitional debates.

On Edward Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996. The most thorough critical account of how public relations emerged as a discipline, focused on Bernays and his contemporaries. Essential context for understanding how propaganda techniques were normalized under a new professional vocabulary.

Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. A more sympathetic biography. Useful for understanding Bernays on his own terms before evaluating his legacy critically.

On the Committee on Public Information

Mock, James R., and Cedric Larson. Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939. The standard historical account of the CPI, written with access to the organization's records. Dated in some respects but still the most comprehensive treatment.

Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. A more critical analysis of the CPI's effects on civil liberties and democratic discourse.

Contemporary and Digital

Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Council of Europe, 2017. (Freely available online.) A widely used contemporary framework for distinguishing between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — the current vocabulary that has partly displaced "propaganda" in policy discussions.

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Particularly useful for understanding whether the definitional frameworks developed for twentieth-century propaganda translate to the contemporary digital media environment.