Category: Culbert Family Book Prize

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Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion: Winner 2022

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The IAMHIST Council and the editorial board of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2022 Culbert Family Book Prize for publications on media history dealing with propaganda is John Maxwell Hamilton for Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (Louisiana State UP, 2021).

Congratulations!

The comprehensive book deals with the cultural history of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state that evolved from the establishment of the Committee on Public Information (CPI) by the Woodrow Wilson administration on 14 April 1917 around the time the US entered the Great War. As author John Maxwell Hamilton argues: ‘Every element of the Information State has antecedents in the CPI’. The international jury members of IAMHIST film historians (Professor James Chapman, UK, Professor Leen Engelen, Belgium, and Professor Tobias Hochscherf, Germany) were impressed by the splendidly researched and wide-ranging book on the  cradle of modern propaganda. The study not only fleshes out the ‘mechanics’ behind propaganda, it also explains how propaganda functions within a democracy, often seriously challenging the very system it seeks to protect. The author and LSU Press ought to be congratulated for this book that marshalled a wealth of archive sources to make a genuinely new contribution to the field. It is lucidly written and provides a compelling narrative that will be of interest beyond just the field of propaganda histories. Since Manipulating the Masses invites future research and engagement with its findings, the book promotes the ongoing scholarly engagement with attempts to win the heart and mind of people through information policies and propaganda that shape our world to this day.

David H. Culbert (1943-2017) was a diligent media historian. More than anything else, his scholarly interest was the research on the history of propaganda, information policy and mass persuasion. He was John L. Loos Professor of History at Louisiana State University, an active IAMHIST council member and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television from 1992 to 2012.

The book prize for publications on media history dealing with propaganda, mass persuasion and public opinion is awarded on behalf of the Culbert family for outstanding works looking at the history of ways in which media, public opinion, politics and diplomacy interact. The $2,500 prize is awarded biennially. The prize has been established by an endowment from Lubna Culbert.

One Comment

The Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion

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David H. Culbert (1943-2017) was a diligent media historian. More than anything else, his scholarly interest was the research on the history of propaganda, information policy and mass persuasion. He was John L. Loos Professor of History at Louisiana State University, an active IAMHIST Council member and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television from 1992 to 2012.

 

The prize is awarded on behalf of the Culbert family for outstanding works looking at the history of ways in which media, public opinion, politics and diplomacy interact. It is awarded to monographs and anthologies on these topics that were published within the last four years in English. The deadline for submissions is 1 November 2021. Please send a print copy only of the book to all three jury members listed below. The $2,500 prize will be awarded at the 2022 IAMHIST conference (scheduled to take place from 12-14 July 2022 in Kiel, Germany). The prize has been established by an endowment from Lubna Culbert. The first winner of the prize was Benjamin G. Martin with The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) in 2020.

Please send a print copy of the book to each of the jury members:

Tobias Hochscherf
Kiel University of Applied Sciences
Faculty of Media
Grenzstr. 3
24149 Kiel, Germany

James Chapman
University of Leicester
School of Arts (History of Art and Film)
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom

Leen Engelen
LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven
Tiensevest 96, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

Please note that the prize committee’s decision is final.

Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion: Winner 2020

The IAMHIST Council and the editorial board of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television are happy to announce that the “Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion” is awarded to Benjamin G. Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016). Congratulations!

David H. Culbert (1943-2017) was a diligent media historian. More than anything else, his scholarly interest was the research on the history of propaganda, information policy and mass persuasion. He was John L. Loos Professor of History at Louisiana State University, an active IAMHIST council member and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television from 1992 to 2012.

The book prize for publications on media history dealing with propaganda, mass persuasion and public opinion is awarded on behalf of the Culbert family for outstanding works looking at the history of ways in which media, public opinion, politics and diplomacy interact. The $2,500 prize is awarded biennially. The prize has been established by an endowment from Lubna Culbert.

Martin’s book explains how, after France’s crushing defeat in June 1940, the Nazis moved forward with plans to reorganize a European continent now largely under Hitler’s heel. While Germany’s military power would set the agenda, several among the Nazi elite argued that permanent German hegemony required something more: a pan-European cultural empire that would crown Hitler’s wartime conquests. At a time when the postwar European project is under strain, Benjamin G. Martin brings into focus a neglected aspect of Axis geopolitics, charting the rise and fall of Nazi-fascist “soft power” in the form of a nationalist and anti-Semitic new ordering of European culture.

As early as 1934, the Nazis began taking steps to bring European culture into alignment with their ideological aims. In cooperation and competition with Italy’s fascists, they courted filmmakers, writers, and composers from across the continent. New institutions such as the International Film Chamber, the European Writers Union, and the Permanent Council of composers forged a continental bloc opposed to the “degenerate” cosmopolitan modernism that held sway in the arts. In its place they envisioned a Europe of nations, one that exalted traditionalism, anti-Semitism, and the Volk. Such a vision held powerful appeal for conservative intellectuals who saw a European civilization in decline, threatened by American commercialism and Soviet Bolshevism.

Taking readers to film screenings, concerts, and banquets where artists from Norway to Bulgaria lent their prestige to Goebbels’s vision, Martin follows the Nazi-fascist project to its disastrous conclusion, examining the internal contradictions and sectarian rivalries that doomed it to failure.

 

 

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