The history of childhood is an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on age as a central category of analysis. To understand better the lives of children in the past and the cultures that defined them, childhood historians often integrate the methods and concerns of the social sciences, media and cultural studies, educational and intellectual history, and material-culture studies. Much recent childhood scholarship has converged on the post–World War II period, examining the influence of politics, institutions, and the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s on young people. Books in this vein include Mickenberg’s work on radical children’s literature, Delmont’s study of American Bandstand, and de Schweinitz’s research on children and the civil-rights movement.1 Holt’s Cold War Kids is a helpful contribution to this growing historiography.
Holt seeks to understand the ways in which the presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower “reacted to special problems and needs associated...