FYS: Empire of Lies? Propaganda, Technology, and the Public Sphere

3 Credits.

Can a government control what people believe? Who gets to decide what counts as “truth”—and how is it made to stick? This First-Year Seminar traces a century of information, communication, and warfare in Russia, from Lenin’s revolutionary use of radio to Putin’s troll farms and deepfakes. Along the way, we will grapple with questions that remain urgent today: What is propaganda, and how can we recognize it? Can the press respond to peoples’ concerns under an authoritarian regime, or does power inevitably shape the narrative? And in an age of algorithms and viral misinformation, are citizens of democracies any better at resisting manipulation than those living under dictatorships?We’ll dig into the technologies themselves—print, radio, television, and digital networks—to understand how each new medium created fresh possibilities for persuasion, resistance, and control. And we’ll get hands-on: working with rare propaganda posters, samizdat publications, and archival materials in JHU’s special collections, you’ll encounter the physical artifacts of ideological warfare—the paper, ink, and design choices that shaped how messages landed. By the end of our seminar, you’ll never watch the news (or scroll your feed) the same way again.