This study of theatre censorship has laid bare the boundaries of the permissible; the messages that people – from bureaucrats to artists, playwrights, and spectators – promoted to advance their view of the world; and the limits of these worldviews. Whilst wanting to recognize the continuities and ruptures across regimes, the book repeatedly shows how the bureaucratic and lateral censorship processes worked together as well as against each other during the period 1788–1818. Taken as a whole, this book rejects the argument advanced by many scholars that censorship was purely repressive and negative; the positive, even propagandistic potential of censorship for plays and their effects on the public sphere must also be taken into account. In doing so, this study also emphasizes the importance of the individual, and how archival material has helped bring these forgotten histories back to life.

For most of the period from the end of the Ancien Régime to 1818, there was a form of state censorship of the stage: a bureaucratic censorship process. This chapter stretches as far back as 1402 to understand the culminative measures that shaped a play’s path on the eve of the Revolution – in both Paris and the provinces – before analysing the numerous and, at times, conflicting Revolutionary orders relating theatre surveillance. It argues that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (August 1789) transformed such censorship from a necessary part of the creative process to a coercive force. It also demonstrates that although the Revolution is remembered for the ‘freedom of the theatres’ with the law of 13 January 1791, bureaucratic censorship was swiftly reintroduced, and the process was expanded during the Revolutionary decade and solidified further under Napoleon and the Restoration.

The epilogue explores the enduring legacies of this historical encounter between American soldiers and Chinese civilians. In the People’s Republic of China, the recurring persona of the Chinese victim facing American brutality, further popularized through propaganda during the Korean War, continues to influence popular Chinese anti-American nationalism. In the United States, while the occupation of China remains a largely forgotten history, practices in China created important precedents and patterns for US military involvement with other nations in the following decades. As tensions between the two nations reach new heights today, the legacy of this “lost era” continues to be contested through divergent historical accounts from both countries, shaped by radically changing geopolitical concerns. The shadow of the American occupation remains long and haunting.

The efforts of the survivors of the Sasun massacre, and their allies in the ABCFM, to disseminate narratives of state violence were countered by the Ottoman state as it sought to maintain a monopolization of legitimate narrative. In both cases, the story of Sasun played on the global stage. Telegraph wires carried the story of Sasun, and the apologetics of the Ottoman government, to readers around the world. Like all technologies, the telegraph was a Janus-faced tool. It helped actors disseminate information, but it also helped them control it. In the Ottoman Empire, the telegraph allowed the state to centralize information. Never before had the Ottoman state possessed such control over information flows. Yet, the telegraph also disseminated narratives that largely circumvented Ottoman censors. These narratives, collected by missionaries, consuls, and journalists, contributed to protests in the United States and Great Britain. As more stories of massacres appeared in newspapers abroad, the Ottoman state clamped down to maintain its desired public image.

This chapter argues that by any measure – mass conscription, full economic mobilization, blurring of civilians and combatants, blockades, sieges, scorched earth, murderous occupation, unfree labour, and state control – the Soviet Union was involved in ‘Total War’. The Soviet state set a new benchmark in its exhaustive mobilization of resources, including human labour. The government, reaching the height of its power, achieved a mobilization of resources for the front so complete that the home front population was close to collapse by the war’s end. Covering the period from the invasion in 1941 to the end of the war, the chapter examines the mass evacuation of people, industry, and herds in the face of invasion; the rationing system and supplementary food policies; compulsory labour mobilization of free citizens and prisoners; labour laws and repression; propaganda and popular support; and the liberation of the occupied territories. It examines the deep sacrifices made by ordinary people in terms of consumption, living and working conditions, and daily life in order to provision the front.

This chapter examines the drastic deterioration of US–Soviet relations from 1945 to Stalin’s death in 1953. It argues that the “cold war” was neither inevitable nor an objective reality. Instead, the shift from negotiation to confrontation was spurred by misconceptions, and the intense mutual enmity stemmed from subjective constructions as much as divergent fundamental interests. US leaders’ expectations that America’s unrivalled economic strength and monopoly on nuclear weapons would lead the USSR to go along with US plans for the postwar world collided with Soviet leaders’ determination not to be intimidated or to relinquish their domination of Eastern Europe. Journalists and propagandists on both sides worked to reshape public images of their former allies, stoking fears and inflaming ideological differences that had been set aside earlier. Key US officials, particularly George F. Kennan, exaggerated the US ability to shake the Communist system’s hold on the peoples of the USSR. through propaganda and covert action. Meanwhile, Soviet propagandists misleadingly depicted American media demonization of their country as part of US preparation for war against the USSR.

The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

This chapter explores the ways in which folk music and dance were linked to science and politics in the twentieth century. To understand these relationships, the chapter starts with nineteenth-century collections of folksongs, which determine the canon of Bohemian and Moravian folk music until the present day. The traditional forms of folk music recorded by nineteenth-century collectors nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. This decline coincided with the emergence of a prominent folk revival, marked by the proliferation of both amateur and professional folk ensembles in post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist era, which lasted until 1989, these endeavors were officially aligned with the Communist Party’s politics and often carried propagandistic undertones. In the late twentieth century, folk music ensembles and practitioners were both influenced by and influencing classical music, as well as, later, rock and jazz, with institutionalized radio broadcasts playing a significant role in this evolution.

This chapter explores the sacral aspects of Achaemenid Persian kingship. It attempts to precisely illuminate the ruler’s relationship with the divine and to demonstrate that the assumption of priestly prerogatives was an important aspect of his office. To better appreciate the political function of religion, this study provides cultural and historical contexts for the royal appropriation of sacral attributes. It further contributes to the recent field of study regarding a possible soteriological dimension to Achaemenid ideology by assessing and synthesising new and previously cited evidence for the existence of such an element, as well as its possible applications.

Using press advisors – and, in Continental Europe, press bureaus – politicians employed repressive and proactive methods for influencing the press. The older, repressive method consisted of censorship, but politicians gradually shifted towards proactively shaping rather than preventing publicity. They wrote and edited newspaper articles themselves and ‘inspired’ content in different newspapers. In Britain, politicians relied on the papers of their political party; in Germany, the chancellor and emperor had to rely on (semi-)official newspapers. Despite Britain’s free press rhetoric, papers like the Times closely interacted with government as well. Newspaper ownership was already more concentrated in the colonies, enabling a politician to gain widespread control there – as did Rhodes in South Africa. Press agencies formed nodes in international communication, subjecting them to politicians’ interference. Politicians’ contacts with the press were smoothed through secret payments, though such secrecy was often exposed, making it counterproductive. Traditional methods of influencing the press lost effectiveness. Censorship became counterproductive, with court cases generating only more publicity for censored content. Commercialization made newspapers financially independent and less susceptible to politicians’ payments. The mass readership was less interested in newspapers that expressed political opinions, or even described politics to begin with. While politicians still managed the press, they thus needed new strategies for attaining favourable coverage.

Chapter 1 analyzes the recordkeeping practices established in Kenya during the Emergency through the reorganization of colonial intelligence services. This chapter explores the connection between the British paranoia against Mau Mau fighters in particular and Kikuyu-speaking peoples in general and the administration’s anxious obsession with recordkeeping and the maintenance of Emergency secrets. Following a discussion of key terms and contexts, such as the colonial concept of information management and the Emergency period, this chapter situates the “migrated archives” in the colonial politics of concealment.

Ramajanmbhoomi, the supposed exact site where Lord Ram was born and where a mosque called Babri Masjid stood for 400 years, has been contested between Hindus and Muslims in India for over eight decades. Lord Ram is a much worshipped and revered god in north India, and the Hindu right, over a period of several decades, claimed that the site of his exact birth had been overtaken by a mosque constructed by the Mughal emperor Babur. The sites and spaces where temples and mosques sit have led to much bloodshed since the country’s independence from the British in 1947. This chapter discusses how the conflict around Ramajanmbhoomi was created through propaganda.

Chapter 1 defines the theoretical homes of this book and shows why and how harm in language has resulted in legislative actions. The chapter creates dialogue between two broad fields: the study of meaning in language and critical studies of South Asia. The chapter provides a brief history of Hindu right in India and an overview of how the government has weaponized language against Indian Muslims in the last three decades. This chapter shows that a critical aspect of understanding the success of the Hindu right in India, a secular democracy whose inception is underlined by massive violence between different religious groups during the partition, is to understand how it slowly and with cunning use of language sowed seeds of sectarian distrust. The chapter argues that while Hindu right has been studied from multiple perspectives, a linguistic perspective is missing. Such a perspective shows how successful the Hindu right has been in taking actions that lead to long-term harm to Muslim communities in India.

In response to First World War propaganda campaigns and the emerging science of behaviorist psychology, which downplayed or even denied the existence of “mind” (understood as an agency directed by human cognition and will), American modernists performed the mind in and as writing: as a potentiating agent of mental plasticity to reshape habits, modifiy beliefs and behaviors, and dramatize the strategies by which consent is “manufactured.” An American modernist literary “aesthetics of exposure” sought to arrest habitual thought by exposing the behaviorist strategies of conditioning behavior and regimenting beliefs. The major works examined in this chapter – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and John Dos Passos’ the U.S.A trilogy (1936) – deploy strategies of psychological and textual fracture and fragmentation in order to make state-sponsored propaganda technique visible and available for critique.

Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.