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If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
Bill Vaughan

It feels like tracking the peace symbol was my destiny. I began photographing the peace symbol at the antiwar rallies I attended in the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War. As a father of a young family then, living in southern California, I wasn’t part of the hippie movement that was sweeping the state and the country, but I did have strong feelings about war. I vividly remember my World War II childhood in the rural San Fernando Valley – the air raid sirens, the rationing, and the flags in the windows of families with a service member overseas. Fear was a vivid fixture of my childhood, even after the war ended. With the 1950s came a different kind of war, the Cold War, and with it the threat of nuclear annihilation. The air-raid drills went on, and a new, larger terror replaced fears of the World War II era.

By the mid 1960s, Jannice and I had our first child and the country was involved in a new conflict. But the Vietnam War did not rouse the patriotic fervor of World War II. At about that time, I became friends with my neighbor, Ted Schoenman. Ted's son Ralph had been Bertrand Russell's private secretary and eventually became director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Ralph had also been instrumental in organizing the Committee of 100 Against Nuclear War – a strident ban-the-bomb group in London in the early 1960s.

Though I didn't know it at the time, all of this connected back to my interest in the creation of the peace symbol. Ralph’s information filtered down to his father, who in turn opened my eyes to a broader political worldview, beyond what I had previously learned from my local paper and national television. Soon I had developed a passion for politics and concern about the war. With the 1968 presidential election around the corner, I slapped a Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker on our VW Squareback, paid 25 cents for my first peace symbol button, and let my hair grow a little longer.

Like a lot of other young Americans, I took to the streets to protest the growing involvement in Vietnam. At each one of the demonstrations I attended, the rallying symbol was that circle with what looked like a drooping tree inside it. The peace symbol. Everywhere I looked – on posters, medallions, earrings, cars, graffiti. That simple circle design had become a magnet, an icon for the counterculture and the anti-war movements.

What has surprised me in the decades since is that the peace symbol continues to exert almost hypnotic appeal. It’s become a rallying cry for almost any group working for social change.

With my background in design, I'm fascinated by the simplicity of the peace symbol and how people have used it, worn it, adapted it. Each iteration of the symbol seems unique, because it bears the artistic touch of the person replicating it. The fact that the symbol is easy to recall and draw – just a circle with three lines in it – might account for some of its worldwide recognition and proliferation, but I think it's more than that.

I was fortunate enough to correspond with Gerald Holtom, the symbol's designer, ten years before his death in 1985. He critiqued my original notes on the history of the symbol, which have now culminated in this book. I continue to correspond with some of his children and a nephew. They have all been generous in sharing family photos, diaries, letters and notes, and memories. His life story and the symbol’s are in many ways inextricably linked.

Certainly, my own life has become intertwined with the symbol and with the pressing need to tell its story, a story I have been documenting through my own photographs, press clippings, and primary sources for decades now. On the 50th anniversary of the peace symbol, I can only hope that it will continue to inspire, and inform generations to come.
- Ken Kolsbun

The stamps I am holding (with my right hand) were used in Denmark and Germany in the mid 1960s. To the dismay of some people who objected to the commercialization of the peace symbol, the United States Postal Service put its stamp of approval on the peace symbol in 1999 and offered it as a 33-cent stamp. The public selected the symbol during a nationwide balloting a year earlier as one of the 15 commemorative stamps saluting the 1960’s. M2 Communications reported, "On August 3, 1999, the new Peace Symbol commemorative postal stamp was unveiled by the United States Postal Service at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a Hollywood night club of choice for celebrities and hippies of that era." Singer Nancy Sinatra joined in the celebration."