Marilyn Irvin Holt. Cold War Kids

The history of childhood is an emerging field. A growing number of historians now focus their scholarly attention on how phenomena like war and economic depression have shaped childhood and our conceptions of childhood. Marilyn Irvin Holt makes a valuable contribution to this historiography with her examination of the politics of childhood in the United States during the early Cold War. Holt makes two larger arguments in this book. First, in her “exploration of the relationship between the political landscape, cultural views of childhood, and the impact these had on the country's young” (p. 10), Holt contends that the postwar years were a pivotal era in American childhood. The child became much more central in the American political imagination. The second argument put forward in Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 is that as childhood grew in importance so too did the role of the federal government, particularly because some of the problems of childhood were deemed too complex for local and state solutions.

Argument (complex analysis) · Child abuse · Cold war · Developmental psychology · Early childhood · Economic history · Government (linguistics) · Great Depression · Historiography · History of childhood · Poison control · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Suicide prevention · World War II · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies