Surveys the social, cultural, and political history of the United States during the decade of the 1950's.

Photos and reminiscences of life the 1950s, part of the decade-by-decade series that vividly documents the Crescent City’s history. Remember when Mardi Gras was cancelled in 1951 in tribute to the men fighting the Korean War? Surely you were there for Elvis Presley’s visit to the Municipal Auditorium in 1956, and you must recall the first time you crossed the brand-new Greater New Orleans Bridge. How about the milk bottle on top of the Cloverland Dairy? For those who were there and those who wish they were, Mary Lou Widmer recalls these and many other images and events that define the decade. Packed with photographs, her remembrances will delight and entertain all who lived through this unique decade in New Orleans and fascinate anyone intrigued by the city’s past—from the tumult of integration to the worries about communism to the rapid growth of Gentilly, Metairie, and other suburbs.

Blessed by a booming economy, the United States experienced the benefits of technology in the 1950s, with television and the automobile transforming the way people lived, and the space race offering new challenges. At the same time, the nation faced domestic divisions and international crises that would have far-reaching historical and political consequences. The 1950s evoke images of prosperity, suburbia, a smiling President Eisenhower, cars with elaborate tail fins, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and the "golden age" of television-seemingly a simpler time in which the idealized family life of situation comedies had at least some basis in reality. A closer examination, however, recalls more threatening images: the hysteria of McCarthyism, the shadow of the atomic bomb, war in Korea, the Soviet threat manifested in the launch of Sputnik and the bombast of Nikita Khrushchev, and a clash over the integration of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Andrew J. Dunar successfully shows how the issues confronting America in the late twentieth century have roots in the fifties, some apparent at the time, others only in retrospect: civil rights, environmentalism, the counterculture, and "movements" on behalf of women, Latinos, and Native Americans. The rise of the "beats," the continuing development of jazz, the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, and the art of Jackson Pollock reveal the decade to be less conformist than commonly portrayed. While the cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union generated the most concern, Dunar skillfully illustrates how the rise of Nasser in Egypt, Castro in Cuba, and Communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, and China signaled new regional challenges to American power. This book will be ideal for instructors of American history survey courses at the high school and undergraduate levels.

Going Home to the Fifties presents the ideals of suburban living as seen through the lens of magazine advertisements of the era. Full-colour ads accompany the text to guide the reader on a journey through an idealised neighbourhood of the times from the schools, roads and commuter trains to the homes, kitchens and backyards.

This text explores some of the key debates about British cinema and film theory, and examines the curious mix of rebellion and conformity which marked British cinema in the post-war era.

In this book, Eleonora Ravizza analyzes how contemporary American popular culture has represented and reproduced the fifties. By investigating the cultural work of films and TV series from the last two decades, the book uncovers the inherent limitations of a ‘revisionist’ take on the fifties. Ravizza argues that, due to the visual nature of the fifties—crystallized in American consciousness through the widespread influence of television—most contemporary attempts to rework and rewrite the regressive gender, queer, and racial politics fall short of such a revisionist reevaluation. ​

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s. Breaking from dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or the rise of postmodernism, Back to the Fifties reveals how Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988 was utilized by a range of audiences for diverse and often competing agendas. Films from American Graffiti to Hairspray and popular music from Sha Na Na to Michael Jackson shaped - and were shaped by - the complex social, political and cultural conditions of the Reagan Era. By closely examining the ways that "the Fifties" was remade and recalled, Back to the Fifties explores how cultural memories were fostered for a generation of teenagers trained by popular culture to rewind, record, recycle and replay.

The brightest stars of the 1950s live on in this wonderful, black-and-white gallery of publicity shots. Includes 114 major stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Kirk Douglas, and dozens more.

Ellwood frames his detailed and lively account with the provocative idea of the fifties as a "supply-side" free enterprise spiritual marketplace, with heady competition between religious groups and leaders, and with church attendance at a record high.