For nearly fifty years, Charles Schulz's Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture, with many arguing that it was beloved precisely because it was apolitical in a postwar period of social and political turmoil. Historian Blake Scott Ball challenges that common perception, showing us how Peanuts has always been political.
Through fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents, Ball reveals how Schulz's beloved comic strip was a daily, decades-long conversation about the rapidly changing politics of his time, including the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, and the future of a nuclear world.