In
Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg argues that "by maintaining the democratic spirit of the 1930s through the Cold War, children's literature became a kind of bridge between the Old Left and the New Left generations" and contributed to the youth rebellions of the 1960s. Working from a vast array of primary sources, including 33 author interviews, several hundred fiction and non-fiction books for children, and other archival materials, Mickenberg builds her argument by contextualizing close readings of children's books in their historical time and place. While she is not the first to discuss dissent in a Cold War context, Mickenberg shows that this dissent was right out in the open in children's books; its very accessibility points to pervasive "counterhegemonic impulses" and the survival of the Popular Front in the midst of McCarthyism.
