History 468, America Since 1960 Link to Course Outline

August 26-28 Introduction to the Course, Life in the Postwar Order

Required Reading: Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 1-23

Recommended website reading

My outline on life in the postwar order

Military spending and concerns:

· Military Industrial Complex” complete speech by Eisenhower

· The Military Industrial Complex and its critics

Race issues, both South and North

· A Southern Congressman Explains Lynching, 1948

· “And These Are the Children of God”: Fears of Homegrown Terrorism in Cold War AmericaTerrorism in the South in the 1940s and 1950s

· 1949 Arguments for Federal Civil Rights Legislation

· Testimony from an African-American Taxpayer Unable to Vote in Alabama, 1958

· W.E.B. DuBois on why he wouldn’t vote in 1956

· Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison—classic work on being Black in 1950s America

· “The Negro in the North”: South African Novelist Alan Paton Dissects the Racial Situation Beyond the South

· Letters to the Editor about Alan Paton’s 1954 Article “The Negro in America Today”

· Black and White Fathers in Atlanta Try to Explain Race Relations to Their Sons, 1955

· “Digest Of Jim-Crow Laws Affecting Passengers in Interstate Travel”

The Affluent society and its culture and fears:

· Advice to Parents about Raising Children at the End of World War II

· Colliers Magazine discusses the Distractions of Youth –allaying fears of anomie

· The Comic Book Code of 1954

· TV Censorship in the 1950s

· Nostalgia for the 50s website –lots of links to mainstream icons of the period

· Outrage for Invasions of Privacy by marketers –oh, what a distance from the present!

· The Quiz Show Scandal (see links at bottom for additional testimony)

· Air Waves “are in the Public Domain”: Public Television Advocacy in the 1950s

· Tanning Becomes a Fad

· White Men are the Weaker Sex—Perceptions of Men in the 1950s

· “Women Without Men”: The Pros and Cons of a “Man-Free Life”

· Worrying about the Single Men (and Women) – marrying and conformity

· Kinsey

· Attitudes toward Smoking in 1950s

· Advocating Sex Education in the 1950s

Women in American Society

· Adlai Stevenson, Presidential Candidate, describes Women’s role in American Society

· Women Workers Wages in the age of affluence

· “The Bottom of the Economic Totem Pole”: African American Women in the Workplace

· A Waves Officers Says Mothers Can be Soldiers

· The Army Shouldn’t “Dictate the Terms of Motherhood”

· The Department of Defense says that Mothers Can’t be Soldiers

· “Politics Is a Pretty Personal Thing with Women”: A1950s Look at the Impact of Women Voters

· Chronological developments for Women in the 1950s

Labor in the Postwar Order

· GM Rejects Reuther’s Call to “Open the Books”: The Post-WWII Strike Wave

· Truman Speaks on the 1946 Railroad Strike—using Government power to Tame Labor

· Anti-Union Violence in the Wake of Taft-Hartley

· Union Officials Blame the Taft-Hartley Act for Mob Antiunion Violence

· Argument that Congress should extend the minimum wage to farm workers (1949)