Jake Spitzack
Staff Writer
Charles Schulz’s famous “Peanuts” comic strip has been a mainstay of American popular culture for nearly 75 years. In fact, at the height of its popularity, half of the American public reportedly read the comic each day. The cartoon’s innocent characters were quick to turn a frown upside down but also sparked conversations about weighty social issues, including the Vietnam war, feminism and segregation.
In February, Blake Scott Ball, author of “Charlie Brown’s America” will dive deep into the influence the comic strip had on American society between 1950 and 2000 at a forum hosted by the Minnesota Historical Society. Ball will lecture 10 a.m.-noon and 2-4 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 10, in the 3M auditorium at the Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. The earlier time has a virtual option. Cost is $16 in person or $12 virtually.
“Peanuts” has been a lifelong favorite of Ball’s.
“My grandmother would save the Sunday morning funny pages for me as a kid, so I was reading ‘Peanuts’ growing up and it always had this particular mystique to me because there were a lot of times I was confused [by the underlying message],” said Ball, a history professor at the University of Alabama. “When I became an adult researcher who was looking for ways to understand America in the Cold War on a very street-level view, I viewed ‘Peanuts’ and the conversations around it as a really unfiltered entryway into recovering the emotional experience of American life in that period.”
Ball’s book is based on his grad school dissertation and ultimately took nine years to complete. He traveled all over the country during that time examining original “Peanuts” artwork and panels, business records, and countless letters from Schulz’s readers, who ranged from grade school students to U.S. presidents. Ball said Schulz received about 500 letters every day. He recounted numerous occasions when he’d be sifting through documents at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., and Schulz’s wife would stroll in with yet another dusty box of documents from her attic ready to be archived.
“I’ll look at some concrete examples of how ‘Peanuts’ influenced conversations with its audience and was also changed by the conversations with its audience,” said Ball of his lecture. “Sometimes Schulz would adapt the strip to push-back he’d get from various segments of the national audience and sometimes he’d push back against them. For example, he refused to segregate Peppermint Patty and Franklin’s school classroom even though southern newspaper editors in the late ’60s and early ’70s started pulling the comic strip in protest…. It’s an incredible life and story and I think Schulz is underappreciated for what an important individual he was in how Americans understood the world between the 1950s and 2000.”
“Peanuts” first hit newspapers in 1950 and Schulz single-handedly wrote and drew all the strips until his death in 2000. Ultimately, he created more than 17,000 strips – some from a hospital bed following a major heart attack in the ’80s. While reruns still appear today, it is illegal for anybody else to draw his characters.
Born and raised in St. Paul, Schulz was drafted in World War II and spent three difficult years in the fight against the German Army in France before returning to home soil. He spent much of his adult life in California after “Peanuts” skyrocketed in popularity.
Ball is an Alabama native and has a doctorate in American history from the University of Alabama. His book was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of History Forums presented by the Minnesota Historical Society. The lecture series explores the complexity of American history with some of the nation’s best scholars. Two other events are scheduled for this spring: Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies, March 30; and Making America’s Public Lands, April 20. One of the History Center’s newest exhibits – The Life and Art of Charles M. Schulz – is on display through June 9. It features 30 Peanuts comic strips, details of “Peanuts” characters’ development, photos and memorabilia of Schulz, interactive activities including puzzles and drawing tables, and more. For more information on the upcoming forum, visit mnhs.info/hf24.
