Politics and Practices of visual propaganda in Portuguese Estado Novo: An Introduction

Mass print media, such as newspapers and illustrated magazines, created mass audiences at the beginning of the twentieth century, offering fertile ground for governments wishing to mobilise entire societies for war or to disseminate information or propaganda to large groups of people in relatively short spaces of time. In the 1920s and 1930s, these printed means were joined, for political propaganda purposes, by cinema, photography and radio, which were especially exploited in the new authoritarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.