9. Affluence and Anxiety: The 1950s
POWERPOINT PRESENTATION
FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. To what extent did American culture in the 1950s reflect the imperatives of the Cold War?
Required Reading
Elaine Tyler May, "Cold War-Warm Hearth: Politics and the Family in Postwar America", chapter 6 of Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle eds, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989) OR May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), intro and chapters 1, 4 & 5.

Further Reading
Joanne Meyerowitz, "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reappraisal of Post-War mass culture, 1946-58" Journal of American History Vol. 79, No. 4. (Mar., 1993), pp. 1455-1482 (JSTOR)
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War
Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, Rethinking Cold War Culture (2001), especially the introduction and essays by Meyerowitz, Filene and Brinkley
Tom Engelhart, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (1995)

Primary Documents
"Atom Bomb Baby" audio file
The Kruschev-Nixon "Kitchen Debate", in Moscow in 1959 [at the CNN website]
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958
Disaster anxieties of the 1950s and 2000s compared (courtesy of UPenn and the New York Times)
The Six Thousand Houses That Levitt Built, 1948
Gays in Government -- 1950 House of Representatives debate