Posters for Peace : : Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action / / Thomas W. Benson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn State University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Benson, Thomas W.,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.) :; 66 color/54 b&w illustrations

By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians—including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon—exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy—even in a time of war.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Posters for Peace -- Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action -- A Time to Kill, and a Time to Heal -- Be Young and Shut Up -- Peace Is Patriotic -- We Are Exporting Democracy -- The Berkeley peace posters in the Penn State University Collection -- Plates -- Notes -- Sources -- Index