Read more
Despite--or because of--its huge popular culture status,
Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the
Peanuts gang.
In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's
Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years,
Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table.
Most people have come to associate
Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, not the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some have even argued that
Peanuts was so beloved because it was apolitical. The truth, as Blake Scott Ball shows, is that
Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of a nuclear world,
Peanuts was a daily conversation about very real hopes and fears and the political realities of the Cold War world. As thousands of fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents reveal, Charles Schulz used his comic strip to project his ideas to a mass audience and comment on the rapidly changing politics of America.
Charlie Brown's America covers all of these debates and much more in a historical journey through the tumultuous decades of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Snoopy and the rest of the
Peanuts gang.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. You're a Good Man, Charles Schulz: The Making of an American Original
- 2. The Future Frightens Me: The Cold War Origins of Peanuts
- 3. Bless You for Charlie Brown: Peanuts and the Evangelical Counterculture
- 4. Crosshatch Is Beautiful: Franklin, Color- Blindness, and the Limits of Racial Integration
- 5. Snoopy Is the Hero in Vietnam: Ambivalence, Empathy, and Peanuts' Vietnam War
- 6. I Believe in Conserving Energy: Peanuts, Nature, and an Environmental Ethos
- 7. "I Have a Vision, Charlie Brown": Gender Roles, Abortion Rights, Sex Education, and Peanuts in the Age of the Women's Movement
- Epilogue: Snoopy Come Home
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Blake Scott Ball is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Alabama.
