1. 1950s
Life in America

2. Living in the 50s Baby Boom
In 1957 there was one baby born every 7 seconds

4. Living in the 50s Suburban Living “The American Dream”
By /3 of the US population lived in suburbs

5. Living in the 50s Consumerism
Businesses create franchises like McDonald’s
Everything is the same/mass produced
America becomes more HOMOGENOUS

10. Living in the 50s Car ownership more than doubles
1956 – Interstate Highway Act – largest public works project in US history! 41,000 miles of new highways built

12. Working in the 50s Men Women Children
Corporate culture, factory work decreasing
Women
Children

16. The Trouble With Women

18. Living in the 50s
Culture
Television – from 7,000 to 50,000 TV sets in the US in less than 5 years

20. Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley
Beatniks – counterculture (be different)

22. Howl, by Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull ...

23. Politics in the 50s Fear of spies Hydrogen Bomb
Smith Act and McCarran Act made Communism illegal
Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg accused of spying
Hydrogen Bomb

24. Politics in the 50s
Joseph McCarthy
HUAC