- "The Mayflower Voyagers" - The Peanuts gang are among the Pilgrim children who sail on the Mayflower in 1620. In the New World, Squanto teaches them how to survive, and the colony's bountiful harvest leads to the first Thanksgiving.
- "The Birth of the Constitution" - In 1787, the Peanuts gang does chores around Independence Hall, where the Founding Fathers are trying to hammer out a Constitution for the new nation.
- "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk" - The gang visits Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, where they witness the first airplane flight by The Wright Brothers.
- "The NASA Space Station" - Linus dreams that he and the gang are astronauts on a future NASA space station.
- "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad" - Charlie Brown gives a class report on the transcontinental railroad, which is intercut with footage in which the gang are among the workers building it.
- "The Great Inventors" - The kids each give reports on important American inventions, focusing on the telephone, the phonograph, the electric light, and the first American-made cars.
- "The Smithsonian and the Presidency" - The gang visits the Smithsonian, where they discuss three great moments in U.S. presidential history. These are Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Theodore Roosevelt's camping trip with John Muir, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
- "The Music and Heroes of America" - Schroeder tries to give a report on the history of American music at the same time that Lucy is giving a report on American heroes. Through the lens of both, American history is brought up to the tumult of The '60s, which is the most recent time period covered by the series.
The series was rerun in 1990, which was the last time it was ever aired in full. However, an edited version of "The Mayflower Voyagers" has often been paired with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on both television and DVD.
This series contains examples of:
- Actually, I Am Him: In "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk", after Charlie Brown crashes the Wright Brothers' kite, two men run up to see if he's all right. Charlie Brown worries what the Wright Brothers will say about their kite, only for the two men to reveal that they are the Wright Brothers.
- All Asians Wear Conical Straw Hats: In "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad", the Chinese workers are portrayed wearing these.
- Amusing Injuries: Near the end of "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad", Snoopy and his marching band are hit by a locomotive, which results in nothing more than ruined instruments.
- Anachronic Order: Confusingly, the series starts off as chronological but later ceases to be. Granted, some episodes take place simultaneously with others, but at the very least, episodes five and six should be between two and three, and episode four should be last.
- Artistic License – History: In "The Birth of the Constitution", Benjamin Franklin is portrayed doing his kite experiment in 1787 whereas it would actually have occurred more than thirty years earlier.
- Barefoot Poverty: As Pilgrims in "The Mayflower Voyagers", many of the Peanuts kids go barefoot, notwithstanding the occasional animation error in which their bare feet are colored in brown. In "The Birth of the Constitution", Charlie Brown and Marcie are still barefoot, at least most of the time, but the others have shoes throughout.
- Bindle Stick: Spike has one in "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad". He carries a small cactus and a harmonica inside of it.
- Caught in a Snare: In "The Mayflower Voyagers", a Pilgrim man gets caught in one of these.
- Celebrity Paradox: Lampshaded in two episodes:
- In "The Smithsonian and the Presidency", Charlie Brown and Lucy discover the lunar and command modules from Apollo 10 (nicknamed "Snoopy" and "Charlie Brown", respectively), and a Peanuts Sunday strip.
- In "The Music and Heroes of America", it is declared that the Vince Guaraldi piece that would be permanently affiliated with the Peanuts characters through the specials was named "Linus and Lucy" "by coincidence."
- Dream Episode: The events of "The NASA Space Station". It starts with Linus and Charlie Brown on the phone, shifts to Linus's dream as he falls asleep, and ends with him waking up, realizing he was dreaming, and then cutting to the next day at their school.
- Drives Like Crazy: Snoopy as the buggy driver in "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk", who drives fast over rough ground, leaving Charlie Brown looking more than a little nauseous at the end. Lampshaded with the remark "The buggy ride was a little hectic."
- Earn Your Happy Ending: "The Mayflower Voyagers" recounts all the misery and death that the Pilgrims went through during their transatlantic voyage and their first year in America, before ending happily with the bountiful harvest of 1621.
- The Faceless: Despite many adult historical figures being shown and heard, "The Great Inventors" and "The Music and Heroes of America" feature the kids' teacher still speaking with "wah-wah" sounds (though she can be seen from the neck down at one point).
- Failed Future Forecast: "The NASA Space Station" is set in "the mid-1990s", when a new NASA space station has been established. This is meant to be the Space Station Freedom, which Ronald Reagan proposed in 1984. Budget cuts would later kill the project as it was originally envisioned, but it would eventually evolve into the International Space Station, which began construction in 1998.
- Green Aesop: Touched on in "The NASA Space Station", when the gang sees the Earth from space. Later, this theme is focused on more fully in "The Smithsonian and the Presidency", when Teddy Roosevelt's conservationist policies are discussed.
- Head Desk: During "The Music and Heroes of America", when Lucy ends up delaying Schroeder's section on George M. Cohan in favor of her own report, a frustrated Schroeder ends up slamming his head into his piano twice.
- Historical In-Joke: In "The Birth of the Constitution", Charlie Brown invents baseball and basketball. Lucy regards them with skepticism. Later on, she invents American football, and you can probably guess where that's going.
- An Immigrant's Tale: Discussed in "The Music and Heroes of America", with the customary late nineteenth-century setting.
- Is This Thing Still On?: In "The NASA Space Station", the news cuts live to the space station just when Lucy and Linus are arguing about the quality of her leadership, with Linus declaring that the whole crew is on the brink of mutiny.
- Last-Name Basis: In "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk", Dolly refers to Charlie Brown as "Mr. Brown", even though they're the same age.
- Nice Guy: Orville and Wilbur Wright in "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk". When Charlie Brown accidentally crashes their kite, they're more concerned about him possibly being hurt, and are even kind enough to fix the bike he'd crashed earlier.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The newscaster in "The NASA Space Station" is a caricature of Walter Cronkite in appearance and voice.
- Peace Pipe: Massasoit is shown smoking one with the Pilgrims in "The Mayflower Voyagers".
- Pop-Star Composer: The one aspect of this series that everyone liked was the music. Rather than the more generic scores used for Peanuts animation after the death of Vince Guaraldi in 1976, they went back to Jazz, and brought in different notables to score individual episodes, like George Winston in "The Birth of the Constitution"note , Wynton Marsalis in "The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk", Dave Brubeck in "The NASA Space Station", Dave Grusin in "The Smithsonian and the Presidency" and David Benoit in "The Great Inventors"; Benoit later would take over as the full-time Peanuts composer. Several of the composers even released albums of their scores.
- Production Foreshadowing: Late in "The NASA Space Station", as the Peanuts gang are talking about events from American history, Lucy brings up the Transcontinental Railroad, which would be the subject of the very next episode (albeit aired three months later).
- Retraux: At the end of "The Mayflower Voyagers", the gang plays a seventeenth-century version of the "Linus and Lucy" theme, with Schroeder's instrument sounding like a harpsichord since pianos weren't invented yet in 1621.Squanto: There are still a few of your customs that I do not understand.
- Riding into the Sunset: The final episode, "The Music and Heroes of America", features the gang walking into the sunset as they hum "Linus and Lucy".
- Space Station: "The NASA Space Station" takes place on one, obviously. As detailed above, the episode is based on the assumption that the then-current plans for the Space Station Freedom would go forward as scheduled.
- Stalker Shrine: In "The NASA Space Station", Sally's living area is decorated with pictures of Linus.
- Stock Footage: Unlike other historical figures depicted, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. appear in actual footage rather than as animated characters, maybe because they lived recently enough that there is sound footage of them.
- Stock Sound Effect: In "The NASA Space Station", two of Charlie Brown's screams are stock audio of the famous "AUGH!" scream by his first voice actor, Peter Robbins.
- Tempting Fate: In "The NASA Space Station", a rather cranky-sounding Franklin tells the reporter that with this crew, he hopes there won't be an emergency... moments before a meteorite hits one of their solar panels.
- Thanksgiving Episode: "The Mayflower Voyagers" is basically one, which is why it's often been paired with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. In particular, when ABC had broadcast rights to the Peanuts specials, this was done to fill an hour-long time slot.
- Universal-Adaptor Cast: The Peanuts cast are played this way, as they are placed into different periods of American history.
- The Wild West: The setting of "The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad", obviously.
