In 1928, Edward Bernays -- an American nephew of Sigmund Freud, and a man widely recognized as one of the founders of modern advertising and propaganda practice -- opened his seminal work Propaganda with this observation: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." Further, he reasoned that because "many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress," it is the task of the propagandist to move people to action by appealing not to their reason but to their emotions. In this course, we will investigate how such appeals work, or have worked, in the recent history of Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy, China, Japan, the United States, and the Middle East. Beginning with classic theories of mass propaganda and persuasion, we will move through case studies of propagandistic mobilization by appeal to moral outrage at wartime atrocity reports, to fear of exclusion from dominant power structures ("The Emperor's New Clothes"), to intergenerational resentments, and to sexual, racial and class insecurities and the fear of death. We will also inspect the dynamics and iconography of totalitarian ruler--‐cult (Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao), compare strategies of mobilization for total war and techniques of military recruitment, and look at the ways in which changing media technologies inform propaganda techniques.