Innocent Weapons

“Riveting.” — Journal of American History

“A provocative rethinking of the role of ideology in the Cold War.” — The Russian Review

“[A] masterful understanding of both US and Soviet politics and policy. . . . A distinct and useful contribution to the understanding of the experiences of children and youth during Cold War America as well as priorities and politics of this significant period.” — Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“Effectively challenges anthropological portrayals of childhood as strictly culture-bound. . . . Leaves us with a deeply uneasy sense of the political polyvalence of children and childhood — not just during the Cold War, but for our contemporary political moment as well.” — Allegra Laboratory

“Peacock highlights the construction of an elaborate play-ground intended to illustrate ‘that American children played in better, more modern, and more enlightened environments than Soviet youth’” — American Quarterly

“Peacock does an excellent job of bringing together both the American and Soviet uses of childhood to justify their respective systems and to mobilize their people.”—Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians

“Masterfully researched and powerfully argued, Margaret Peacock’s book draws attention to the fact that childhood was a Cold War project in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., one that failed spectacularly.” — Kate Brown, author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“For much of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union were superpowers engaged in a struggle against one another in which children were held up as symbols of each state’s successes and failures. Margaret Peacock examines visual and textual images of children that appeared in the propaganda and public rhetoric of the Cold War from approximately 1945 to 1968 in order to understand how Soviet and American politicians, propagandists, and supporters depicted children in film, television, radio, and print as objects of changing Cold War anxieties and symbols for new forms of mobilization…This book adds another dimension to our understanding the Cold War and the Thaw.” — Jacqueline Olich, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Innocent Weapons is smart, innovative, and well written. . . . It is, in fact, one of the deepest and most balanced works that I have read on the international history of U.S.-Soviet relations and stands as a path-breaking contribution to studies of the Cold War, popular culture, and comparative history. This is a first–rate and original work.” — Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin