Hi all, I'm a budding historian (earning B.A. in May, applying for PhD programs) who is extremely interested in how societies represent themselves. I've done original research examining evolving treatments of area bombardment and the Japanese-American internment in U.S. high school history textbooks, and I've also written on propaganda in ancient Rome.
I'm interested in learning more about the history of propaganda over time, preferably in some sort of text that details its evolution, but I'm also interested in works that examine it over more specific periods of time, such as Nazi propaganda, or modern Russian propaganda.
Thanks for the help!
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies is expensive if you don't have access to an academic library or Interlibrary Loan through your public library, but I bet it would be perfect for your purposes. The essays are split between historical case studies of 'moments' of propaganda (like British versus American pamphlets on slavery) and essays that use a particular historical example to talk theoretically about what "propganda" is and how it works.
I moonlight as an early Reformation historian. My personal favorites are:
Mark Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther - which looks at the early Protestant "publishing offensive" in the early 1520s as well as the dynamics of the Catholics' utter failure to respond in print
Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria - which carries the Reformation story into the later 16th century to show how Catholics (and a little bit of insight into Protestants) rebuilt their authority in the territories they continued to control