The Price of "Selling America"

As an amateur historian and business major in college, I have to admit that Domosh's article was the most fascinating for me to read. As she points out, advertising is, at a very basic level, about the creating a branded image for the company - and the most wide-spread and insidious ads are about creating an image for America.

The first question that came to my mind while I was reading this, and the one that stuck there as I continued to read her Singer case study, was this: how much influence did ads like these have not only in the creation of the United States' image in the nineteenth century, but also in the proliferation of this imperialist, "civilized" image even into the twenty-first? It's an image that has clear ramifications for our relationships with the other countries of the world, perhaps most obviously those in the Middle East, particularly Iran.