Cold War Culture

Tuesday:

Quick quiz just on your homework: How did your subject/event shape American life? What did Americans react to it / think about it? List the sources you used.

Then discuss your research and reading on American culture of the 1950s.  Focus question: To what extent was this culture shaped by the cold war?

• Car culture: design, impact on the landscape
  • Interstate Highway Act 1956
  • decline of cities, rise of ex-urbia
• consensus or conformity?
• baby boom
• suburbia (e.g. Levittown)
  • impact on culture
  • racial barriers
  • American religiosity
• women as homemakers and workers
• television: impact on advertising, politics
• teen culture
  • concerns about "juveneille delinquency"
  • rock and roll
• the Beats! (Read this excerpt from Allen Ginsberg's Howl if you have time)

Homework for Wednesday: Reading on civil rights movement, pp. 853-864 in Nation of Nations

We Shall Overcome

Wednesday:

What were the significant challenges and setbacks of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s? Why was it that the movement began to make headway in this period? What were the various strategies, and how did they change over time? Why?

Timeline of NAACP activity and resistance.  Then, an investigation into segregation and the civil rights struggle in Seattle.

Homework for Friday: Study for your 1/2 period quiz (multiple choice, short answer, short IDs) on the Great Depression through 1950s. To study, review the reading and class notes, and focus on key ideas emphasized in class. CHANGE: Read the last two documents in the handout distributed today (by Stokely Carmichael, and the investigation in the FBI's tracking of MLK)

Friday:

How did the Civil Rights movement shift in the 1960s? Brief discussion, and then your quiz.

Homework for Tuesday:  Read in Nation of Nations from the bottom of 833-842; 844-848