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

Online ISBN:
9781469618593
Print ISBN:
9781469618579
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

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

Margaret E. Peacock
Margaret E. Peacock
University of Alabama
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Published:
25 August 2014
Online ISBN:
9781469618593
Print ISBN:
9781469618579
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons. Their smiling faces were used to sell everything, including war. This book offers an unprecedented account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally-charged images of children to attempt to create compliance among their citizenry for their policies at home and abroad. In the end, however, no one could control these ubiquitous images or the meanings that they conveyed. Groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of napalmed, abandoned, and segregated children to indictthe state and its policies. Commonly, the Cold War is viewed as an ideological divide between the capitalist West and the communist East. Yet despite their differences, the book demonstrates a deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images to similar ends. Based on extensive research spanning fourteen archives and three countries, the book tells a new story of the Cold War, seeing the conflict not as a divide between East and West, but as a struggle between the producers of culture and their target audiences.

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