WINNER of the 2024 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Single Work in Popular & American Culture— Popular Culture Association
WINNER of the 2024 Lawrence W. Levine Award for Best Book in American Cultural History— Organization of American Historians
WINNER of the 2026 Senior Prize for Outstanding Toy Research— International Toy Research Association
REVIEWS
"An excellent account of the toy industry’s interaction with the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. . . ."
–Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post
“Rob Goldberg shows a far more diverse and politically engaged playroom than we might assume considering stereotypes of postwar American culture. Radical Play is an eye-opening history and a hopeful story for our own times.”
–Amy F. Ogata, author of Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America
"Eminently readable."
–Letty Cottin Pogrebin
"Goldberg has fashioned an important and enlightening study. . . . Radical Play opens a new window onto toy culture. . . ."
–Howard P. Chudacoff, American Journal of Play
"Deeply researched and engagingly written, Radical Play mines the playroom as a major front in the broader progressive struggle for cultural change in the postwar United States. . . .
–Colin Fanning, Winterthur Portfolio
Rob Goldberg tells terrific stories . . . . His critical and nuanced account of the toy world’s politics tells an important story while serving as a model for how future researchers might engage with toys as primary sources.”
–Meredith A. Bak, author of Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture