NJS: An Interdisciplinary Journal Summer 2017 215 NJS Presents Museums, Archives, Artifacts, and Documents News In this Issue: Alonzo Earl Foringer’s Greatest Mother in the World: The New Jersey Roots of the Most Famous Poster of World War I By Nicholas P. Ciotola DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/njs.v3i2.88 Despite renewed interest in the illustrated posters of World War I brought about by the commemoration of the war’s centennial, few extant works in either the academic or public history sectors offer comprehensive explorations of individual posters. This article provides a microhistory of The Greatest Mother in the World (1918), an impactful lithographic poster designed by New Jersey muralist Alonzo Earl Foringer and inspired by a slogan from a Princeton graduate turned advertising executive named Courtland Smith. Printed and distributed in the millions, Foringer’s poster reached a level of mass appeal unsurpassed by any other piece of American visual propaganda produced in the war years. A detailed look at the background and impact of this important poster explores a lesser-known and understudied aspect of World War I history, while also affording an interdisciplinary research model that can be utilized for future studies of additional posters and their place in American visual culture. It is perhaps the most memorable image in the history of Italian Renaissance art. In Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499), a seated, berobed Virgin Mary cradles the lifeless body of an adult Jesus Christ. Fifteenth-century viewers marveled at the beauty and humanity of the sculpture, which Michelangelo carved from a single slab of Carrara marble. Four hundred years later, Pietà provided the inspiration for a Red Cross fundraising poster by a New Jersey-based muralist named