“IMAGES OF WAR” is a pictorial review of the sacrifices soldiers of the military service make to insure freedom has its day! Each picture is provided by someone who has served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, or Marine Corp. From brutal war to civic actions the soldiers of the United States of America serve to right any wrong in the world. They must not be forgotten! Their service is pictured here with that in mind. Take a few minutes to honor them with your appreciation during your review of this book. This book explicitly pictures their challenging life as soldiers of freedom. May God bless each and every one!

Contributors to this volume address the issue of the representation of warfare, in an attempt to assess the veracity or mendacity of war images and their probable impact upon the sequence of events. War images may trigger unfathomable horror or conversely and paradoxically attain sublimity. The margin is sometimes narrow between ethics and aesthetics, let alone the almost irrepressible shift from information to propaganda.

THE TRIUMPH OF IMAGE over reality and reason is the theme of this book. New communication technologies have made possible the transportation of images and words in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world. We thought we witnessed the Gulf War as we sat, mesmerized by the imagery. But the studies from the many countries assembled for this book suggest that it was not the war in the Persian Gulf that we witnessed but rather imagery orchestrated to convey a sense of triumph and thus to achieve results that reality and reason could never have achieved. The book offers contributions from thirty-five authors in eighteen countries, including short samplings from the media of several regions. The authors explore the social, economic, and political context of media coverage in their countries, the domination of one image in most of them, and the struggle for alternative perspectives. The authors probe the dynamics of image-making and pose some challenges for the future as well as provide us with a unique glimpse of how the world outside of the United States (as well as many Americans) viewed the war in the Persian Gulf and how the dynamics of image-making and information control operate. Triumph of the Image will be useful to scholars and students in communications and mass media, international relations, political science, cultural studies, propaganda, censorship, and contemporary history as well as to the general public.

It seems to be a tenet of the human condition to perceive “others” as “different” and potentially hostile. In nearly all societies stereotypes are developed to stigmatize suspected enemies within and without. The American case is particularly interesting in this respect because American society consists of nothing but “others”; to be open to “others” and welcome those who are “different” is one of the basic tenets of the country. However, this principle often conflicts with the need to integrate all these “strangers” into a homogeneous, governable society, which causes the formation of hostile stereotypes of certain ethnic groups that do not “fit in.” The authors in this volume look at the development of these “enemy images,” which form a fairly consistent pattern, from the period of the American Revolution to the post–World War II era. In doing so, they focus on the question of to what extent these enemy images influence the formulation and outcome of foreign, domestic, and immigration policies.

Focusing on the popular prints used by the Northern side of the American Civil War, this book examines the importance of graphic arts in rallying support for the Union during the war and in shaping the national memory after the war.