Charlie Brown's America tells the story of how and why the lovable kids and an adventurous beagle of Peanuts became the unlikely spokespeople for American life in the last half of the twentieth century.

Now beginning readers can learn all about Charles M. Schulz’s iconic comic strips, beloved characters, and the cartoons and movies in this nonfiction Level 3 Ready-to-Read about the history of the Peanuts Gang! Did you know that many of the characters in A Charlie Brown Christmas were voiced by regular kids from the producer’s neighborhood? Or that Charles M. Schulz had his first sketch published at age fourteen in the local newspaper’s “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” feature? What about that NASA has an award called the Silver Snoopy for outstanding achievements related to flight safety and mission success? Become a History of Fun Stuff Expert on Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang, and amaze your friends with all you’ve learned in this fun, fact-filled Level 3 Ready-to-Read! A special section at the back of the book includes Common Core–vetted extras on subjects like science, social studies, and math, and there’s even a fun quiz so readers can test themselves to see what they’ve learned! Learning about history has never been so much fun! © 2017 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

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 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.

Charlie Brown and his friends are hitting the baseball field for a long day of fun in the sun! But the game turns into something more when the Peanuts gang starts learning about the many men and women who changed the course of history by helping their fellow humans. This touching ode to some of the world’s great humanitarian heroes—including one forgotten hero who helped little kids!—will warm hearts and inspire. Book includes presentations on great humanitarian heroes and activity pages.

The long 1960s is often considered to be a period of extreme polarization in American politics. This study of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts franchise (comic strips, television programs, films, and merchandise), however, reveals that through the 1960s and 1970s there remained a large popular audience for centrist discussions of the period's most controversial issues. Public religion, racial integration, the Vietnam War, feminism, the environmental crisis, and conflicts over the future of consumer capitalism all received considerable treatment in Schulz's work. While this might be surprising to critics and journalists who often assumed that Peanuts was merely an escapist endeavor, this perception could not be further from the truth. Peanuts readers and viewers certainly saw the truth. Over the forty years covered in this project, they wrote thousands of letters to Schulz to praise or condemn his discussions of real world issues. These letters have provided a rather unlikely window into the political and social thought of Middle America in the Cold War years. Such correspondence formed the focal point of this dissertation. Ultimately, this dissertation shows the ways that Schulz cunningly navigated the politics of Middle America, gaining historic popularity and demanding unprecedented editorial and licensing control over his franchise. But this dissertation also shows that as Schulz became increasingly popular, corporate interests, government officials, and the public increasingly appropriated the Peanuts characters, infused them with new meaning, and deployed them to their own ends.