Only rarely since the Civil War has the United States been attacked at home, so propaganda has often been deployed to motivate Americans to commit its people and resources to armed conflict. This essay examines print and visual media that have shaped American attitudes toward war from as early as the Revolutionary War, with a primary emphasis on propaganda for twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars. In addition to parsing the rhetoric and imagery of propaganda campaigns, the essay also examines the postwar consequences of propaganda, including how the rhetoric of one war shapes the terms of the next. Propaganda is not a moment in the history of culture; it is an element in the structure of culture.