Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War

by Margaret Peacock

Overview

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons, their smiling faces used to sell everything, including war. In this provocative book, Margaret Peacock offers an original account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally charged images of children in an attempt to create popular support for their policies at home and abroad.

Groups on either side of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of endangered, abandoned, and segregated children to indict the enemy’s state and its policies. Though the Cold War is often characterized as an ideological divide between the capitalist West and the communist East, Peacock demonstrates a deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images to similar ends, despite their differences. Based on extensive research spanning fourteen archives and three countries, Peacock tells a new story of the Cold War, seeing the conflict not simply as a divide between East and West, but as a struggle between the producers of culture and their target audiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469618586
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/25/2014
Series:	New Cold War History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Margaret Peacock is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Masterfully researched and powerfully argued, Margaret Peacock’s book draws attention to the fact that childhood was a Cold War project in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., one that failed spectacularly.” — Kate Brown, author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“For much of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union were superpowers engaged in a struggle against one another in which children were held up as symbols of each state’s successes and failures. Margaret Peacock examines visual and textual images of children that appeared in the propaganda and public rhetoric of the Cold War from approximately 1945 to 1968 in order to understand how Soviet and American politicians, propagandists, and supporters depicted children in film, television, radio, and print as objects of changing Cold War anxieties and symbols for new forms of mobilization…This book adds another dimension to our understanding the Cold War and the Thaw.” — Jacqueline Olich, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Innocent Weapons is smart, innovative, and well written. . . . It is, in fact, one of the deepest and most balanced works that I have read on the international history of U.S.-Soviet relations and stands as a path-breaking contribution to studies of the Cold War, popular culture, and comparative history. This is a first–rate and original work.” — Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin

Editorial Reviews

“Riveting.” — Journal of American History

“A provocative rethinking of the role of ideology in the Cold War.” — The Russian Review

“[A] masterful understanding of both US and Soviet politics and policy. . . . A distinct and useful contribution to the understanding of the experiences of children and youth during Cold War America as well as priorities and politics of this significant period.” — Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“Effectively challenges anthropological portrayals of childhood as strictly culture-bound. . . . Leaves us with a deeply uneasy sense of the political polyvalence of children and childhood — not just during the Cold War, but for our contemporary political moment as well.” — Allegra Laboratory

“Peacock highlights the construction of an elaborate play-ground intended to illustrate ‘that American children played in better, more modern, and more enlightened environments than Soviet youth’” — American Quarterly

“Peacock does an excellent job of bringing together both the American and Soviet uses of childhood to justify their respective systems and to mobilize their people.”—Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians

From the Publisher