The Gang presents a musical tribute to American folk songs.

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

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.

Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz insisted good ol' Charlie Brown and his friends were neither "great art" nor "significant." Yet Schulz's acclaimed daily comic strip--syndicated in thousands of newspapers over five decades--brilliantly mirrored tensions in American society during the second half of the 20th century. Focusing on the strip's Cold War roots, this collection of new essays explores existentialism, the reshaping of the nuclear family, the Civil Rights Movement, 1960s counterculture, feminism, psychiatry and fear of the bomb. Chapters focus on the development of Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder, Franklin, Shermy, Snoopy and the other characters that became American icons.