The book looks at how both the Soviet Union and the United States used the idea of childhood as a way to mobilize American and Soviet populations to go along with their ideas and policies.
Peacock said she had two big inspirations that led her to write the book. Her first inspiration was the Daisy ad displayed on the cover of her book, which was something she found when studying for her doctoral degree in the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Archives at the University of Texas.
“In the ad there is a little girl who is picking petals from a daisy, she said she’s counting them as she picked each petal, and all of a sudden in the background a voice comes over and starts a countdown and then a nuclear bomb goes off and kills her and everything else all together.”
Her second inspiration for writing the book came to her when she was driving home that same day in 2003.
“I turned on the radio and President George W. Bush was saying that we needed to send our troops to invade Iraq in order to defend America’s children,” she said.
As a Russian historian, Peacock was curious to see if the Soviet Union had done anything similar to the Daisy ad or the radio announcement she had just heard, and discovered they had.
“We used to always understand the Cold War as a divide between communism and capitalism, but if you look at the Cold War story from the lens of the child it becomes a fight between those who have the power to manipulate an image for the population and the intended consumers of those images,” she said.
Peacock will be hosting a lecture Wednesday at 4 p.m. in 205 Gorgas Library. She will be discussing her novel with copies available for purchase and signing afterwards.
