ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers the period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1970s, when a period of detente began between the US and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War era, American childhood was highly politicized. In the period following World War II, American adults quickly realized that the conflict with the Soviet Union, while it did include wars fought primarily by proxy armies at a safe distance from the national borders of either nation, would not be a 'shooting war'. The American Revolution, while strongly rooted in republican ideology on the colonial side, was not essentially a conflict with fundamental British political thought. Indeed, many of the writers from whom the nation's founders drew inspiration and upon whose ideas they had based their own political thinking were British.
