While primary sources provide an unparalleled insight into what successive British governments wanted their citizens to know, think, and do, for context, it is also important for students to read academic literature on the subject.
Below you will find a number of books and book chapters recommended by Professor David Welch, who is Emeritus Professor of Modern History and Honorary Director of the Centre for the Study of War, Propaganda, and Society, at the University of Kent. Welch also co-curated the exhibition on propaganda and persuasion at the British Library and authored the book that accompanied the exhibition, titled Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (British Library/Chicago University Press, 2013).
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World War I
P. Buitenhuis. The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914-18 and after (Batsford, 1989)
G.S. Messinger. British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 1992)
J.M. Read. Atrocity Propaganda 1914-1918 (Arno Press, 1972)
N. Reeves. Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War (Croom Helm, 1986)
M. Sanders and P. Taylor. British Propaganda during the First World War (Macmillan, 1982)
P.M. Taylor. British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
D. Welch. Germany and Propaganda in World War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (I.B. Tauris, 2014)
D. Welch. ‘Images of the Hun: the Portrayal of the German Enemy in British Propaganda in World War I’, in D. Welch, (ed.), Propaganda, Power and Persuasion: from World War I to Wikileaks (I.B. Tauris, 2015)
World War II
J. Chapman. The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945 (I.B. Tauris, 1998)
S. Eliot & M. Wiggam (eds). Allied Communication to the Public during the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2020)
R. MacKay. Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2002)
I. McLaine. Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (George Allen & Unwin, 1979)
S. Nicholas. The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939-1945 (Manchester University Press, 1996)
D. Welch. Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War II (British Library, 2016)
Post-1945
W. Crofts. Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (Routledge, 1989)
H. Vaizey. Keep Britain Tidy and Other Posters from the Nanny State (Thames & Hudson, 2014)
D. Welch. Protecting the People: the Central Office of Information and the Reshaping of Post-War Britain, 1946-2011 (British Library, 2019)