Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts

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 o