Think of it as the nation's largest advertising campaign.

Before the days of radio and t-v, the United States used a unique format to reach millions of people.

Tom Gerhardt joins us with more in this month's Inside History.

The United State entered World War I on April 6th, 1917

Our nation faced several obstaclesmost notablyhow to finance the great war

Many ideas were brought into play to convince Americans to donate to the cause

The most successful? Posters. In this weeks edition of Inside History, we visit the Herigate Center to see one of the largest collections in the country

They tug at your heartstrings, fill you with prideand patiotism.the posters were one of the most successful ways of impessing upon everyone that they needed to be part of the war effortthat this was an overall effort that included not just the soliders on the battlefield but if also included everybody at home Sometimes the images were used to fill you with fear and anger

They also did a really good job of Painting the enemy and some of them were really pretty graphic

They needed to put at the forefront of peoples minds who the enemy was, what was wrong with the enemy, what they were doing and how again you could defeat this evil menace in the world by subscribing to bonds, by planting a garden, by not eating meat, by raising chickensby whatever means they could think of. Jerry Newborg is the state archivist. There are over 600 posters in North Dakota's collectionone of the most extensive collections in the country

Among the imagesa chilling connection to 9-11. You can see the fire, flames, and devastation and a direct hit on the statue of liberty

When we took a look at this shortly not that long after 9-11 we really did a double take on it because of our emotional connection to itconnection in our time to this poster and now it had a whole new meaning to it

Tom:How impactful were these posters?They helped raise a majority of the funds to support the US war effortclose to 22 billion dollars

Probably the largest portion of these posters were used to raise money and overall the US spent about 30 billion dollars in world war one, and 22 billion of that was raised through bondsborrowing money from you and me for ordinary people But there was nothing ordinary about the artwork. The posters were made by the premiere illustrators of the time

Of all of those the ones that can come out with the full color with a simple but very effective message with great emotional appeal are posters and I think this is really the height of poster art

Melvin Gillmore is the man responsible for collecting the posters during World War I. He was the state archivist at the time. The collection includes posters from around the world. You can view them at the Heritage Center in Bismarck. watch the video | save this article / add to your favorites list