Examples Of Propaganda In Colonial America

Propaganda in America (1700-1800)

Here’s a question. What can you do to get an entire nation to have the same opinion about another nation? Propaganda! Propaganda has been around for centuries, and has been used to ignite people’s opinions about important topics. Beginning in colonial America and used even after we became a country, we have used propaganda countlessly to spark the emotions of our population towards a common issue. The American press constantly provided more and more examples of this propaganda to unsuspectingly persuade its viewers towards their goal. Propaganda was used to unify the people in this new American land to come together and face the problems that it has as a unified people, and that we should all have a sense of

In the mid-eighteenth century, the press were running wild spreading propaganda to try to encourage the people to participate in gaining our independence from Great Britain. Many tried to encourage the population that going to war with Great Britain would be beneficial for us, in order to bring together the people with nationalism to support our efforts for independence. Henry Palham’s image of the Boston Massacre was, according to a Library of Congress article about British-American relations, “A masterpiece of anti-British propaganda, it inflamed American settlements” (Library of Congress). This image depicts British soldiers firing against innocent American citizens in a crowd in Boston, Massachusetts. The picture was spread across the

“[The press] were not carriers of ideals,” According to Robert G. Parkinson, “but rather tools of propaganda to dupe an unsuspecting public into ratifying policies that lined the pockets of political and economic elites”. (Parkinson). In Parkinson’s opinion, the press used sneaky tactics in order to trick the people into agreeing with their views, which wasn’t always false. There are many examples of press creating depicting images that sway its viewers towards their beliefs, especially when it came to passing certain governmental issues. For example, another of Benjamin Franklin’s cartoons arose when the American colonists were attempting to rid of the Stamp Act, imposed by Great Britain. According to the History Matters website, “[t]his 1767 engraving… warned of the consequences of alienating the colonies through enforcement of the Stamp Act” (History Matters). The image that Franklin creates attempts to awaken its viewers by depicting a very graphical image of a person with its limbs cut off, in order to provoke the people to realize that it was similar to what our colonies were going through. The acts that Britain were enforcing on America were unjust, and the press needed the citizens of the colonies to realize that as well, which is why they wrote and created images of whatever they could to get their