Innocent Weapons

Innocent Weapons
Author: Margaret Peacock
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469618575

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

Growing Up America

Growing Up America
Author: Susan Eckelmann Berghel
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820356638

Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War. Growing Up America places young people-and their representations-at the center of key political trends, illuminating the dynamic and complex roles played by youth in the midcentury rights revolutions, in constructing and challenging cultural norms, and in navigating the vicissitudes of American foreign policy and diplomatic relations. The authors featured here reveal how young people have served as both political actors and subjects from the early Cold War through the late twentieth-century Age of Fracture. At the same time, Growing Up America contends that the politics of childhood and youth extends far beyond organized activism and the ballot box. By unveiling how science fairs, breakfast nooks, Boy Scout meetings, home economics classrooms, and correspondence functioned as political spaces, this anthology encourages a reassessment of the scope and nature of modern politics itself.

Little Cold Warriors

Little Cold Warriors
Author: Victoria M. Grieve
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190675705

Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence--of pickup ball games and Howdy Doody, when mom stayed home and the economy boomed. These nostalgic narratives obscure many other histories of postwar childhood, one of which has more in common with the war years and the sixties, when children were mobilized and politicized by the U.S. government, private corporations, and individual adults to fight the Cold War both at home and abroad. Children battled communism in its various guises on television, the movies, and comic books; they practiced safety drills, joined civil preparedness groups, and helped to build and stock bomb shelters in the backyard. Children collected coins for UNICEF, exchanged art with other children around the world, prepared for nuclear war through the Boy and Girl Scouts, raised funds for Radio Free Europe, sent clothing to refugee children, and donated books to restock the diminished library shelves of war-torn Europe. Rather than rationing and saving, American children were encouraged to spend and consume in order to maintain the engine of American prosperity. In these capacities, American children functioned as ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of the United States. Victoria M. Grieve examines this politicized childhood at the peak of the Cold War, and the many ways children and ideas about childhood were pressed into political service. Little Cold Warriors combines approaches from childhood studies and diplomatic history to understand the cultural Cold War through the activities and experiences of young Americans.

The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America

The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America
Author: Ann Maire Kordas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317321367

This study examines how childhood and adolescence were shaped by – and contributed to – Cold War politics in America.

Learning from the Left

Learning from the Left
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2006
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0195152808

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The Vietnam War in American Childhood

The Vietnam War in American Childhood
Author: Joel P. Rhodes
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820356115

A sort of nebulous sad thing happening forever and ever : childhood socialization to the Vietnam War -- Why couldn't I fight in a nice, simpler war? : comic books and Mad magazine -- Who bombed Santa's workshop? : militarizing play with commercial war toys -- One of the most agonizing years of my life : knowing someone in Vietnam -- Mom tried to make it for us like he wasn't even gone : father separation and reunion -- God bless dad wherever you are : POW/MIA -- How come the flags around town aren't flying at half-mast? : Gold Star children -- Yes, I am My Lai, but My Lai is better than Viet Cong! : Vietnamese adoptees and Amerasians.

Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids
Author: Marilyn Irvin Holt
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 070061964X

Today we take it for granted that political leaders and presidential administrations will address issues related to children and teenagers. But in the not-so-distant past, politicians had little to say, and federal programs less to do with children—except those of very specific populations. This book shows how the Cold War changed all that. Against the backdrop of the postwar baby boom, and the rise of a distinct teen culture, Cold War Kids unfolds the little-known story of how politics and federal policy expanded their influence in shaping children’s lives and experiences—making way for the youth-attuned political culture that we’ve come to expect. In the first part of the twentieth century, narrow and incremental policies focused on children were the norm. And then, in the postwar years, monumental events such as the introduction of the Salk vaccine or the Soviet launch of Sputnik delivered jolts to the body politic, producing a federal response that included all children. Cold War Kids charts the changes that followed, making the mid-twentieth century a turning point in federal action directly affecting children and teenagers. With the 1950 and 1960 White House Conferences on Children and Youth as a framework, Marilyn Irvin Holt examines childhood policy and children’s experience in relation to population shifts, suburbia, divorce and family stability, working mothers, and the influence of television. Here we see how the government, driven by a Cold War mentality, was becoming ever more involved in aspects of health, education, and welfare even as the baby boom shaped American thought, promoting societal acceptance of the argument that all children, not just the poorest and neediest, merited their government’s attention. This period, largely viewed as a time of “stagnation” in studies of children and childhood after World War II, emerges in Holt’s cogent account as a distinct period in the history of children in America.

Kodak Elegy

Kodak Elegy
Author: William Merrill Decker
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2012-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0815651686

An compelling coming-of-age memoir that presents a portrait of suburban life in upstate New York shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam and the constant threat of Nuclear exchange during the 1950's/early 1960's.

American Labor and the Cold War

American Labor and the Cold War
Author: Robert W. Cherny
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780813534039

The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalleled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. Fourteen million strong in 1946, unions represented thirty five percent of non-agricultural workers. Why then did the gains made between the 1930s and the end of the war produce so few results by the 1960s? This collection addresses the history of labor in the postwar years by exploring the impact of the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union on American workers and labor unions. The essays focus on the actual behavior of Americans in their diverse workplaces and communities during the Cold War. Where previous scholarship on labor and the Cold War has overemphasized the importance of the Communist Party, the automobile industry, and Hollywood, this book focuses on politically moderate, conservative workers and union leaders, the medium-sized cities that housed the majority of the population, and the Roman Catholic Church. These are all original essays that draw upon extensive archival research and some upon oral history sources.

Education and the Cold War

Education and the Cold War
Author: A. Hartman
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780230338975

Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Hannah Arendt quipped that "only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics." The Cold War battle for the American school - dramatized but not initiated by Sputnik - proved Arendt correct. The schools served as a battleground in the ideological conflicts of the 1950s. Beginning with the genealogy of progressive education, and ending with the formation of New Left and New Right thought, Education and the Cold War offers a fresh perspective on the postwar transformation in U.S. political culture by way of an examination of the educational history of that era.