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PREFACE

Posters for Peace is a book about a collection of posters made and circulated on and about the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. In May 1970, as part of a national wave of protests against the Vietnam War, an invasion of Cambodia, and the killing of four students at Kent State University, groups of students at Berkeley produced and distributed a series of political posters. This book presents a rhetorical history and criticism, as well as a catalogue of a collection of some of the recovered posters, which are part of the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries.

Posters for Peace describes the rhetoric of those posters, using a historical and critical approach that places them in the circumstances of May 1970. It also employs comparative criticism to set the posters in the context of political discourse and political art more generally, and to consider them as works of visual rhetoric. The book ranges widely over the history and criticism of political debates and political graphics, especially regarding the 1960s and the war in Vietnam, with comparisons to international manifestations of visual and public rhetoric in more recent years. The general aim is to reconstruct the cultural and artistic resources that the artists drew on for inspiration, and to describe how viewers might have made sense of the Berkeley posters in 1970. I also offer a brief account of developments in rhetorical studies that were in part coincidental with the events of May 1970 and eventually gave rise to the subdiscipline of visual rhetoric that partly makes possible the analysis presented here. My own discipline, along with many others, was deeply influenced by the turmoil of the 1960s, as it developed new analytical resources in an attempt to fathom what was happening. I provide extensive notes and bibliography for those readers who want to pursue some of the topics that are treated here only briefly.

I was a witness to some of the events described in this history. I was a visiting professor of rhetoric at Berkeley in the 1969–70 academic year, where I gathered a large sample of the posters, which I kept for almost forty years. In 2008 I donated the posters and some related materials from the period to the library at Penn State University, where they form the basis of a continuing research archive, accompanied by an online digital collection.