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Unlike the chapter on art in section one, this chapter focuses on figures who do not generally feature in accounts of the history of American Art. It commences with a look at the role of artists operating around Haight-Ashbury and at the importance of posters for psychedelic rock concerts and at album cover artwork. It then assesses more overtly political West Coast art, such as the ‘Peace Tower’ erected in LA in 1966, before returning to New York and Andy Warhol’s Factory.

The first major event in the modernization of religious publishing in the twentieth century was the Religious Book Week of the 1920s, an initiative spearheaded by Frederic Melcher and the National Association of Book Publishers. Religious Book Week brought together an emerging American consumerism and a liberal Protestantism in crisis to forge a new approach to marketing religious books, and indeed liberal religion itself. Among the key factors facing the Protestant establishment was a crisis of authority rooted in deep gender anxieties, anxieties revealed in the work of popular author and advertiser Bruce Barton, but most especially in the advertising posters and other materials used to promote Religious Book Week. This commercial poster art reflected a moment of cultural transition, as religious, economic, and cultural forces transformed the long-standing cultural value of character into an emerging ethos of personality. The marketing of liberal religion in Religious Book Week unwittingly aided this cultural shift, even as many of its leading promoters expressed nostalgia for older norms and practices. The work of the psychologist and bestselling author Henry C. Link illustrates many of these developments, especially the emergence of laissez-faire liberalism from religious middlebrow culture.

This chapter focuses on the visual representation of children in the religious poster arts of Pakistan. As in the previous chapter, it locates the representation of childhood within the history of religion and education in the society. The chapter provides a brief history of poster arts in Pakistan, contextualizing the importance of chromolithography in a broader South Asian context. It continues the analysis of cuteness undertaken in the previous chapter, locating it within a broad framework of beauty, which it then demonstrates is related to virtue and goodness in Islamic thought. Focusing on the differences between the ways in which girls and boys are represented, the chapter argues for important differences in the way the gender of children is conceptualized in Islamic societies, introducing a category called girl-women as an indeterminate female age category that lies between the undisputed girlhood of the child and adult womanhood, which is actualized through marriage and motherhood.

The notion of a shared Judeo-Christian national identity became a defining feature of American public life in the war and postwar years. The U.S. government called upon a private interfaith organization, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, to promote the Judeo-Christian concept to the American people. The NCCJ developed a second Religious Book Week, modeled on the endeavor of the 1920s, to advance a religious understanding of American values and interfaith civic cooperation. This reading campaign was promoted in schools, churches, the military and, most especially, public libraries across the nation. Yet the culture of Judeo-Christianity did more than foster a climate of intergroup civic cooperation. Interfaith reading in particular also opened new avenues for explicitly religious interaction and exchange. As revealed in the poster art used to market Religious Book Week, the war furthered the shift from character to personality in American cultural life and likewise promoted the emerging, related culture of spiritual cosmopolitanism. Indeed the wartime effort to promote Judeo-Christianity combined with the culture of middlebrow reading—especially the consumer notion of eclectic picking and choosing—to become the single greatest force in popularizing spiritual cosmopolitanism.

This chapter follows the pattern of the previous two: it begins with a brief history of education and religion in modern Iran in order to situate the discussion of representations of childhood in the society. It brings together poster arts and children’s books that are each the focus of the two previous chapters, and adds other visual materials, especially postage stamps. In the case of Iran, the focus is on materials produced by official and parastatal entities as part of a conscious policy of opinion molding and propaganda. Visual materials commemorating the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Basij volunteer soldiers serve as subjects to advanced theories presented in the previous chapters. In particular, this chapter moves forward the discussion of gender and sacrifice, demonstrating how male and female opportunities for offering the gift of sacrifice occur in different forms and at different ages.

World War II pushed the American middle class in new directions religiously. For decades liberal Protestants had been working to craft a modern, nonsectarian spirituality, a faith suitable for an increasingly urbanized, scientific, and consumer-oriented society. They did this work largely for their own purposes, energized in equal measure by hope and fear regarding the changes they witnessed around them. But during World War II these liberal Protestant ambitions became national priorities. As part of the national mobilization for war, the publishing industry created the Council on Books in Wartime and produced over 100 million books in special Armed Services Editions. This massive publishing and book promotion enterprise was bolstered by government support and propaganda, including the Victory Book Campaign and its poster art, to socialize a generation of men and women into the practices of reading. Pat Beaird of Abingdon-Cokesbury, a Methodist publishing house, coordinated the work of the Council with religious publishers, and became a leading spokesman on issues related to religion, reading, and the war effort.

This chapter explores some examples of photography, poster art, and film from the Spanish Civil War and their implications for reading Woolf's Three Guineas (1938). These aesthetic responses from Spain underscore the connections between war and private life that Woolf enumerates in Three Guineas, and show how the kind of total war that took place in Spain merged the home and battlefronts, demanding new ways to understand the combined front of twentieth-century warfare. The photographs and propaganda images depicting this kind of merged or total war arena employ the transformation of the city into the scene of war for emotional effect and mobilize the figures of women and children in deeply problematic ways. Looking at these materials can help us to understand Woolf's struggle with the brutal images coming out of Spain and her effort to substitute not only a different set of photographs but also an alternative way of viewing.