Britain To-day, Bulletins from Britain, and Britain: Some Semi-official British Periodicals in the United States During the Second World War

International audienceBy the end of the Second World War, British Information Services (BIS) employed over 300 people and possessed a well-oiled machinery for distributing news and background information about the United Kingdom across the United States.1 Based in New York, BIS had been formed in the spring of 1941 in order to coordinate British publicity in the United States under the authority of the British Embassy in Washington but employing staff from the MoI. BIS greatly expanded the British propaganda effort which had grown out of the modest prewar British Library of Information (BLI), controlled by the Foreign Office (FO). One of the channels for BIS's information campaign was the magazine Britain produced in conjunction with the MoI based in London. Britain had originally appeared under the title Bulletins from Britain, but it had been renamed as part of a major revision in 1942. BIS was not, however, the only agency to produce a British propaganda magazine: the British Council, although not physically present in the United States, continued to circulate its magazine Britain Today to a number of American readers.2 Indeed, the British propaganda effort in the United States was marked by interdepartmental rivalry and conflicting views of what information should be given to the American public and through which channels. This parallel history was largely absent from the "official" history by John Wheeler-Bennett deposited in the National Archives, which tended to focus on the gradual construction of an effective propaganda organization. This chapter seeks to flesh out our understanding of how British information to the United States evolved durin