Nostalgia Trap - Episode 284: That's America, Charlie Brown w/ Blake Scott Ball

What do Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and the rest of the gang have to tell us about the staggering loneliness at the heart of the American experience? Blake Scott Ball is a professor of history at Huntingdon College and the author of Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. In this conversation, we trace the history of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip alongside the history of the late 20th century, as we see how Schulz’s characters navigated the Cold War, civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and other epochal events of the era, creating an emotional throughline that continues to permeate the American cultural imagination.