James J. Kimble - Wartime Propaganda, Cultural Memory, and the Construction of Iconic Meaning: The Conflicted Legends of Rosie the Riveter

What does Rosie the Riveter mean? Join propaganda historian Dr. James J. Kimble in tracing the shifting path of one of Western culture’s most enduring iconic images. Rosie is seen by most people as a feminist icon today, but she is also a mythic figure whose World War II-era origins are obscured by the distance of time. This lecture juxtaposes her origins as a conflicted corporate symbol—whose empowering encouragement was overshadowed by the patriarchal wartime context—with her arguably feminist role over 80 years later. To do so, the conversation draws on espionage literature to propose a theory of legend, showing how advocates routinely claim, repurpose, and defend imagery for partisan causes.

James J. Kimble (PhD, University of Maryland) is Professor of Communication, Media & the Arts at Seton Hall University. He is an expert on domestic propaganda, war rhetoric, and visual imagery. His research on the World War II era has reached a worldwide media audience of over 1.2 billion people in more than a dozen languages, and he is the founding editor of the academic journal Home Front Studies.

Professor Kimble served as guest curator and catalog editor for the Norman Rockwell Museum’s major international exhibition Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms; hundreds of thousands of visitors visited the show, including eighty members of Congress.

Named a Distinguished Honor Graduate of the US Army’s Chaplain Center and School (ARNG Religious Affairs Specialist), Kimble has also served as a Fulbright Scholar in Croatia and has been a Senior Fellow at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies.

He is the author of Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda and Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II, as well as the writer and co-producer of the movie documentary Scrappers: How the Heartland Won World War II. His most recent book, co-edited with Trischa Goodnow, is called The 10¢ War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II.