WW II 'Home Front' Posters

By John Hickey
Twenty-six World War Two-era “Home Front” posters will be exhibited at West Virginia University at Parkersburg Aug. 4 through Sept. 15, says the West Virginia Humanities Council, as part of an exhibit traveling to six state venues in 2006.

The posters, exhorting citizens at home to identify with and support the war effort, often featured women in the factory-worker roles they had assumed when most able-bodied men were away at war.


The exhibit, Produce for Victory: Posters on the American Home Front, 1941-1945, presents the best of the Smithsonian Institution’s World War II posters, reproduced along with photographs and original objects organized by the National Museum of American History, according to the Humanity Council’s web site. The posters, say the Council, were collected by the Smithsonian’s curator of graphic arts during WWII and “tell the story of an American home front mobilizing its human and natural resources for the war overseas.”

The cost for the tour, says the Council, is underwritten by the West Virginia Humanities Council through the Museum on Main Street program, a partnership of the Smithsonian Institution and Federation of State Humanities Councils with Rural America. Established in 1991, the partnership was formed as a creative response to the challenges faced by rural organizations to enhance their own cultural legacies.

Images courtesy http://americanhistory.si.edu/victory