Unit 21: 1950s

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Created by
Shakti Arun

Cards (78)

  • Unit 8 1950s

    • Consumerism
    • The Culture of the Car
    • Levittown track homes of the 1950s
    • Suburbia
    • Television
    • Teen Culture
    • Religious Revival
    • Well-Defined Gender Roles
    • The Baby Boom
    • Household products marketed to women
    • Connection to Cold War ideologies
    • Changing Sexual Behavior
    • Progress Through Science
  • Consumerism

    1950s Trivia
  • The Culture of the Car
    • Car registrations: 1945 🡪 25,000,000, 1960 �� 60,000,000
    • 2-family cars doubles from 1951-1958
    • 1956 🡪 Interstate Highway Act, largest public works project in American history! Cost $32 billion, 41,000 miles of new highways built
    • 1959 Chevy Corvette
    • 1958 Pink Cadillac
    • First McDonald's (1955)
    • America became a more homogeneous nation because of the automobile
    • Drive-In Movies
    • Howard Johnson's
  • The U. S. population was on the move in the 1950s
  • NE & Mid-W

    S & SW ("Sunbelt" states)
  • 1955 🡪 Disneyland opened in Southern California. (40% of the guests came from outside California, most by car)
  • Levittown track homes of the 1950s
    • G.I. Bill
    • Mass-produced, affordable homes, $7,990 or $60/month with no down payment
    • Great Migration and "white flight"
    • Little Boxes lyrics, What is the message about society?
    • Racism in Levittown, PA
  • Suburbia

    • Glossy view of mostly middle-class suburban life
    • Social Winners?...AND...Losers?
  • Television

    • 1946 🡪 7,000 TV sets in the U. S., 1950 🡪 50,000,000 TV sets in the U. S.
    • Mass Audience 🡪 TV celebrated traditional American values
    • Television is a vast wasteland. 🡪 Newton Minnow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, 1961
    • Truth, Justice, and the American Way!
    • Family Togetherness
    • Reinforce and challenge conformity, status and materialism
  • Television - The Western
    • Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier
    • The Lone Ranger (and his faithful sidekick, Tonto): Who is that masked man??
    • Sheriff Matt Dillon, Gunsmoke
  • Television - Family Shows
    • I Love Lucy
    • The Honeymooners
  • A photo of the Cleaver family from Leave it to Beaver, a popular TV show in the 1950s-60s
  • Teenager

    • The word "teenager" entered the American language in the 1950s
    • By 1956 🡪 13 million teens w $7 billion to spend/year
  • Rock 'n' Roll

    • 1951 🡪 "race music" 🡪 "ROCK 'N ROLL" (Alan Freed)
    • Elvis Presley 🡪 "The King"
    • Radio now a music-dominated medium
    • Established record companies offered toned-down white "cover" versions that frequently outsold the originals
    • Chuck Berry
  • Juvenile Delinquency

    • Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953)
    • James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
    • 1951 🡪 J. D. Salinger's A Catcher in the Rye
    • Psychologists and popular writers began to address "teen" issues and advised parents on how to raise teenagers
    • Some linked rock 'n' roll to juvenile delinquency
  • The "Beat" Generation

    • Jack Kerouac 🡪 On The Road
    • Allen Ginsberg 🡪 poem, "Howl"
    • Neal Cassady
    • William S. Burroughs
    • "Beatnik"
    • "Clean" Teen
    • Articulated some of the sharpest dissents from conformity, celebrating spontaneity, jazz, open sexuality, drug use, and American outcasts
  • Behavioral Rules of the 1950s
    • Obey Authority
    • Control Your Emotions
    • Don't Make Waves 🡪 Fit in with the Group
    • Don't Even Think About Sex!!!
  • Ironically, teenagers were torn between their identification with youth culture and the desire to become adults as quickly as possible
  • 1950s Slang
  • Religious Revival

    • Today in the U. S., the Christian faith is back in the center of things. -- Time magazine, 1954
    • Church membership: 1940 🡪 64,000,000, 1960 🡪 114,000,000
    • Television Preachers: 1. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 🡪 "Life is Worth Living", 2. Methodist Minister Norman Vincent Peale 🡪 The Power of Positive Thinking, 3. Reverend Billy Graham 🡪 ecumenical message; warned against the evils of Communism
  • Hollywood

    • Apex of the biblical epics
    • It's un-American to be un-religious! - The Christian Century, 1954
    • The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur
  • Well-Defined Gender Roles

    • The ideal modern woman married, cooked and cared for her family, and kept herself busy by joining the local PTA and leading a troop of Campfire Girls. She entertained guests in her family's suburban house and worked out on the trampoline to keep her size 12 figure. - Life magazine, 1956
    • Marilyn Monroe
    • The ideal 1950s man was the provider, protector, and the boss of the house. - Life magazine, 1955
    • 1956 🡪 William H. Whyte, Jr. 🡪 The Organization Man, a middle-class, white suburban male is the ideal
    • Dating Dos and Donts
  • The Baby Boom

    • 1957 🡪 1 baby born every 7 seconds
    • Photograph, 1955 HOW TO BE A GOOD HOUSEWIFE, How is this an ideal image of domestic life for American women?
  • Household products marketed to women
    • A 1950s ad for an electric iron
    • A 1950s ad for a cleaning product
  • Compare the graphs in Document F and Document I
    Write a statement linking the two graphs
  • Documents F and I
    Write a statement connecting the two documents
  • Harper's Weekly article, 1953: How do women feel about domestic life?
  • The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan: How have women changed over the past 20+ years?
  • Connection to Cold War ideologies
    • To support of larger families and high rates of consumer spending, a growing number of married, middle-class women sought employment
    • But this destroyed the traditional family (linked to the threat of communism)
    • High-profile experts weighed in with popular books and articles about the dangers of women who abandoned their housewife roles
    • Conservative trend was also evident in declining numbers of woman college graduates
  • Men and women often worked side by side in the Soviet Union, where 75% of women were working full time jobs by the 1950s
  • Changing Sexual Behavior

    • Alfred Kinsey: 1948 🡪 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1953 🡪 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
    • Premarital sex was common
    • Extramarital affairs were frequent among married couples
    • Kinsey's results are an assault on the family as a basic unit of society, a negation of moral law, and a celebration of licentiousness. - Life magazine, early 1950s
  • Progress Through Science

    • 1951 -- First IBM Mainframe Computer
    • 1952 -- Hydrogen Bomb Test
    • 1953 -- DNA Structure Discovered
    • 1954 -- Salk Vaccine Tested for Polio
    • 1957 -- First Commercial U. S. Nuclear Power Plant
    • 1958 -- NASA Created
    • 1959 -- Press Conference of the First 7 American Astronauts
  • 1957 🡪 Russians launch SPUTNIK I
  • 1958 🡪 National Defense Education Act
  • UFO Sightings

    • Skyrocketed in the 1950s
    • Hollywood used aliens as a metaphor for whom??
  • Atomic Anxieties

    • Duck-and-Cover Generation
    • Duck and Cover (1951)
    • Atomic Testing: 1946-1962 🡪 U.S. exploded 217 nuclear weapons over the Pacific and in Nevada
  • The postwar era witnessed tremendous economic growth and rising social contentment and conformity. Yet in the midst of such increasing affluence and comfortable domesticity, social critics expressed
  • First IBM Mainframe Computer
    1951
  • Hydrogen Bomb Test

    1952
  • DNA Structure Discovered

    1953