Author: Brett Harvey
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 059522959X
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Advanced academic degree, to raise children and keep a home in the suburbs, to follow your dreams of having a profession, and even to live, politically and sexually, far from the mainstream of American life. These are stories of women's lives - some very tragic, some remarkably heroic - and they reveal to us all over again an era we thought we knew so well.
Author: Michael D. Dwyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190246073
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
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.
Author: James R. Gaines
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439101647
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
An “exciting and enlightening revisionist history” (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrates a few solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines. An “enchanting, beautifully written book about heroes and the dark times to which they refused to surrender” (Todd Gitlin, bestselling author of The Sixties). In a series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals—people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts—who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her “in between” sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination unconstitutional, but that was only one of her gifts to the 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book’s unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring’s Rachel Carson and MIT’s preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives—she is in the living world, he in the theoretical one—converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement. The Fifties is an “inspiration…[and] a reminder of the hard work and personal sacrifice that went into fighting for the constitutional rights of gay people, Blacks, and women, as well as for environmental protection” (The Washington Post). The book carries the powerful message that change begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of the decentered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.
Author: Stanley Karnow
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307761517
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American. Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance. Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too. A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.
Author: Beth Bailey
Publisher: Publications International
ISBN: 9781412715485
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Author: David Halberstam
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453286071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1216
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Book Description
This vivid New York Times bestseller about 1950s America from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is “an engrossing sail across a pivotal decade” (Time). Joe McCarthy. Marilyn Monroe. The H-bomb. Ozzie and Harriet. Elvis. Civil rights. It’s undeniable: The fifties were a defining decade for America, complete with sweeping cultural change and political upheaval. This decade is also the focus of David Halberstam’s triumphant The Fifties, which stands as an enduring classic and was an instant New York Times bestseller upon its publication. More than a survey of the decade, it is a masterfully woven examination of far-reaching change, from the unexpected popularity of Holiday Inn to the marketing savvy behind McDonald’s expansion. A meditation on the staggering influence of image and rhetoric, The Fifties is vintage Halberstam, who was hailed by the Denver Post as “a lively, graceful writer who makes you . . . understand how much of our time was born in those years.” This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.
Author: Andrew J. Dunar
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815631033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
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 McCarthy-ism, the shadow of the atomic bomb, war in Korea, the Soviet threat manifested in the launch of Sputnik and the bombast of Nikita Khruschchev, and clashes 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, Chicanos, 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.
Author: Michael Olesker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421411601
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Olesker's doo-wop portrait of Baltimore is nostalgic, but it has a hard edge.
Author: Stephenia H. McGee
Publisher: Back Inn Time Series
ISBN: 9781635640588
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
On the eve of her grandparents' sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, Maddie wakes up in 1956 to witness her grandparents' fairy tale love unfold and learn the secret to finding "the one."
Author: Eleonora Ravizza
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3662618745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
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.
