Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor, Department of History, The University of Alabama

Expert Bio

Margaret Peacock completed her Ph.D. in Russian History at the University of Texas – Austin in 2010. Her first book, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: 2014), examined the role that childhood played in mediating the culture wars that defined the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s. She argued that while the image of the innocent and endangered child was useful in Soviet and American state efforts to construct domestic consensus and compliance, it ultimately contributed to the collapse of that consensus by the late 1960s. Dr. Peacock has written a collection of Russian primary sources: Documents in Modern Russia (New York: Cognella, 2016). In 2022, she co-authored a book that examined the historical roots of the COVID pandemic entitled, A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year (New York: Beacon Press, 2022)  

Wilson Center Project

Voices Carry: International Radio and Propaganda in the Cold War Middle East, 1945-1967

Project Summary

Margaret Peacock’s most recent book tells the history of international radio propaganda into the Middle East during the tumultuous two decades after the Second World War. Using Arabic, Russian, and English sources from fourteen archives around the world, she pieces together the voices and conversations that coursed across the airwaves over Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon. The book begins with an examination of the early international radio efforts of the Palestinian Broadcasting Service, the BBC, Radio Moscow, and Radio Cairo in the 1940s. It then chronicles the explosion of sound that marked the golden age of Middle Eastern radio in the 1950s, marked by the rise of the Voice of Arabs and the introduction of the Voice of America. It concludes with a close examination of the audiosphere during the Suez Crisis, the Lebanese interventions and Yemeni Civil War, and the Six Day War. Peacock argues that over time, the broadcasters’ messages settled into self-sustaining, normalized discursive systems that ultimately undermined the systems of power they were built to promote. 

Major Publications

with Erik L. Peterson, A Deeper Sickness: A Journal of America in the Pandemic Year (New York: Beacon Press, 2022).

Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, August, 2015).

“Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Kinship and Propaganda in the Late Cold War,” Diplomatic History (Winter 2018).

Previous Terms

Title VIII Short-Term Scholar, Summer 2016