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. Although many thousands of posters date from World War I and World War II, the collection covers the entire twentieth century. Posters from the United States (approximately 8,700), the United Kingdom (5,000), Germany (4,200), the Russian empire and the Soviet Union (2,600), and France (1,800) predominate, though posters from more than eighty countries are described in the database.

The cataloged posters are available as 35 mm slides in the Hoover Archives reading room. Cataloging and photography were supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Digital images of the posters will be added to the online database as allowed by copyright laws.

To purchase reproductions of the posters described in the database, please contact Janel Quirante, assistant archivist for visual collections, at janelq@stanford.edu. For more information, see Audiovisual Services. For assistance with poster database searches, please contact Carol Leadenham, reference archivist, at carol.leadenham@stanford.edu.