Posters

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• Issuing agency
• Country of poster
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More than one hundred thousand political posters from around the world are available in the Hoover Archives poster collection. Thirty-three thousand of these are cataloged in a searchable database. Digitized images of the cataloged posters are gradually being added, with twenty-two thousand posters from more than eighty countries available. Images of posters from the United States will be scanned and added in 2009–10.

As Peter Paret et al. observed in Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), the poster is "a work of applied art and … an agent of persuasion and control." Scholarly interest in the impact of the visual image is increasing, and many scholars have approached posters as the subject of their research instead of using them only as illustrations. The depth of the Hoover Archives poster collection provides students of the psychology and techniques of propaganda with a large sample of material on which to base their research.