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

”Ross Melnick's Hollywood’s Embassies presents a groundbreaking study on the global influence of Hollywood’s film exhibition industry, offering a comprehensive examination of how American film screenings have shaped audiences worldwide. Melnick adopts an ambitious, comparative, and longitudinal approach that is rare in contemporary scholarship, making a significant contribution to film history, global history and media studies. He explores the political, cultural, and industrial history of Hollywood, emphasizing the of exhibition venues, architectural styles, programming strategies, and glamorous premieres as cultural and geopolitical agents rather than mere sites of consumption.

Building on his earlier work (Hollywood Showmen, 2012), Melnick’s monograph traces Hollywood’s global footprint through its theaters and distribution strategies, providing a nuanced analysis of the interaction between Hollywood-style screenings and local audiences. Drawing from extensive archival research and press documentation, Melnick offers a theoretically rigorous yet accessible narrative, critically examining the power dynamics and geopolitical complexities of Hollywood's global reach. He addresses the tensions and contradictions inherent in this history and reflects on the industry’s transformations pre-pandemic in the epilogue.

Hollywood’s Embassies convincingly argues that cinema architecture and film exhibition practices were key in promoting an American way of life globally. Cinemas acted as showcases for US popular culture, explicitly aimed at ‘selling America and American democracy overseas’. Melnick’s research spans a broad international scale, revealing the intricate link between US foreign policy and cinematic distribution and exhibition practices. This work highlights Hollywood’s foreign ownership and operation of cinemas, demonstrating how they projected American power worldwide and influenced global audiences. Melnick’s book sets a new standard in the study of Hollywood’s international influence, making it a vital contribution to the field.

”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 prize committee 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.

”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.