Documentation of Media Reflections of the Patriotic Revival in the United States in the 1980s

Abstract

Quantitative evidence for the alleged patriotic revival of the early to mid-1980s in the United States was sought from certain archives under the assumption that shifts in such attitudes would be reflected in the popular culture and mass media. For this report, three archives were identified that were thought to represent converging approaches to the issue: (a) an analysis of the patriotic content of all World Series program covers from 1903 to 1987, (b) a year-by-year count of the number of titles under the rubric of patriotism in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature from 1961 to 1987, and (c) an analysis of filmographies that provided an estimate of the number of commercial war movies—as an index of the appeal of patriotic themes—released annually from 1940 to 1986. Each sort of archive independently displayed an increase of patriotic content in the 1980s; together they empirically support the claim of a patriotic revival in the media.