Hunter collection of Chinese political communication available from RCL

Chinese pamphlets: Political communication and mass education in the early period of the People's Republic of China is an electronic archive of mass education materials published in Hong Kong and in Mainland China, particularly Shanghai, in the years 1947-1954. It includes approximately 200 cartoon books, pamphlets, postcards, and magazines, heavily pictorial in content, on such topics as foreign threats to Chinese security, Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, industrial and agricultural production, and marriage reform. Produced by both Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) and Communist regimes, these materials appear to be directed at the general youth and adult populations of China.

The items were collected and, in many instances, translated and annotated by Edward Hunter. An analyst of propaganda and mass education, Edward Hunter (1902 – 1978) was a journalist, writer, and outspoken critic of Communism. His most well known book was Brain-washing in Red China: the calculated destruction of men’s minds (1951).

This collection constitutes the “street literature” of the revolution: comic books, leaflets and other ephemera distributed to the population of the provincial cities and villages whereas the propaganda collections Western libraries tend to hold are made up of the higher-end, made-for-export propaganda.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges and independent research libraries. The consortium, of which Penn is a member, acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching. These resources are then made available to member institutions cooperatively, through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.

Media Archeology at The Early Visual Media Website

Interested in early forms of multimedia? Then check out The Early Visual Media Website which showcases the precursors to today's multimedia, virtual reality, and time-based media techniques but opens its gates to "all media where people try to reconstruct the visible world around us for artistic and/or entertainment purposes." According to the site's author, Thomas A.E. Weynants, archivist at Ghent University, viewing the variety of "wondrous devices...opens a lot of opportunities for research and discovering in the field of Media Archeology." He admittedly focuses on the more spectacular examples of early visual media. The site is rather confusingly displayed but on the left hand side there is some clear sorting: of Pre-cinema, Photography, Early Film, Television, Fairground Art, Conjuring Arts, and Death Dance. One can also find an extensive list of links to other sites on the web divided into useful categories such as Pre-cinema and optical toys, Chronophotography, 19th Century photography, Daguerreotypes, Stereotography, Fair and vaudeville, Prestidigitation and illusions, Physical culture, the History of television, and others.