Charlie Brown's America

The Popular Politics of Peanuts

By: Blake Scott Ball

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

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 50 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.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Who are you, Charlie Brown ? Listen and find out !

Schultz not only had a lot to say about people, but he also had a unique lens on American politics and how us and it have changed across the entire run of the strip. Sparky seemed to be a mix of both parties, the idealism and desire for fairness/equality of a Democrat and (later in his career) his cozying up to the likes of Regan and his desire for tax cuts that would now have labeled him a republican. Art is a reflection of its creator, and this book gets to the meat of not only who everyones favorite blockhead is, but what he has to say about Schultz and the politics that color his other beloved cast of characters.