"The Importance of Being Wishy-Washy: What Charlie Brown Can Teach Us about the Making of Modern America"

Register in advance for the webinar HERE. 

 

Between 1950 and 2000, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was one of the most read texts each day in the United States. Many experts assumed that such material from the funny pages was worth little more than cheap, escapist entertainment. The reality, however, is that Peanuts regularly dealt with some of the most controversial political and cultural issues of its time, from civil rights to feminism, from religion to the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, the Peanuts characters became powerful symbols for the public to debate their political differences. This talk will look at the ways Peanuts reflected and influenced the emergence of the society we now live in.

Dr. Bell will speak for approximately 45 minutes and take Q&A for approximately 30 minutes.
This talk will be free and open to the public.

 

BIO: Dr. Blake Scott Ball joined the Huntingdon faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, as an adjunct professor at the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. He served as assistant director for the New Summersell Center Public History Initiative at the University of Alabama, and as a graduate assistant for the Alabama Historical Association. An avid writer, he served as editor for the Southern Historian graduate history journal and as a contributor and assistant editor for The Historian behind the History, a collection of oral stories documenting historians’ graduate training and insights into the historical profession, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014. He is the author of Charlie Brown’s America (Oxford University Press, 2021).