Skip to content


Choose a Chapter | Purchase the eBook

1 The Collision Of Cultures
2 Britain And Its Colonies
3 Colonial Ways Of Life
4 The Imperial Perspective
5 From Empire To Independence
6 The American Revolution
7 Shaping A Federal Union
8 The Federalist Era
9 The Early Republic
10 Nationalism And Sectionalism
11 The Jacksonian Impulse
12 The Dynamics Of Growth
13 An American Renaissance: Religion, Romanticism, And Reform
14 Manifest Destiny
15 The Old South
16 The Crisis Of Union
17 The War Of The Union
18 Reconstruction: North And South
19 New Frontiers: South And West
20 Big Business And Organized Labor
21 The Emergence Of Urban America
22 Gilded-age Politics And Agrarian Revolt
23 An American Empire
24 The Progressive Era
25 America And The Great War
26 The Modern Temper
27 Republican Resurgence And Decline
28 New Deal America
29 From Isolation To Global War
30 The Second World War
31 The Fair Deal And Containment
32 Through The Picture Window: Society And Culture, 1945–1960
33 Conflict And Deadlock: The Eisenhower Years
34 New Frontiers: Politics And Social Change In The 1960s
35 Rebellion And Reaction In The 1960s And 1970s
36 A Conservative Insurgency
37 Triumph And Tragedy: America At The Turn Of The Century

Chapter 32: Through The Picture Window: Society And Culture, 1945–1960

Chapter Outline

  1. Postwar economy
    1. Growth and prosperity
      1. Military spending
      2. International trade dominance
      3. Technological innovation
      4. Consumer demand
      5. GI Bill of Rights
        1. Enacted in 1944
        2. Impact on eduction
      6. “Baby boom”
    2. Consumer culture
      1. Home ownership
      2. Television
      3. Limited involvement for blacks
      4. Marketing, packaging, and credit cards
      5. Youth market
    3. Growth of suburbs
      1. Rural-to-urban migration
      2. Levittowns
      3. Automobiles and roads
    4. Great black migration
      1. Southern sources
      2. Urban North and Midwest
      3. Social effects
  2. Postwar conformity
    1. Corporate life
      1. Large corporations
      2. Conformity
    2. Women and cult of domesticity
    3. Search for community
      1. Mobile population
      2. Joining organizations
      3. Church growth
        1. Religious revival
        2. Reassurance
  3. Challenges to complacency
    1. Growing anxiety
    2. Intellectual critics
      1. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society
      2. John Keats’s Crack in the Picture Window
      3. David Riesman and The Lonely Crowd
    3. Youth Culture
      1. “Silent generation”
      2. Juvenile delinquency
    4. Rock and roll
      1. Origins
      2. Bridge between black and white music
      3. Elvis Presley
      4. Vehicle for youth revolt
      5. Controversy
    5. Alienation in the arts
      1. Drama
        1. Oppressiveness of mass culture
        2. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
        3. Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee
      2. The novel
        1. The individual’s struggle for survival
        2. Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, et al.
      3. Painting
        1. Edward Hopper and desolate loneliness
        2. Abstract expressionism
          1. Violent and chaotic modern society
          2. Jackson Pollock
          3. William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al.
      4. The Beats
        1. Liberation of self-expression
        2. Greenwich Village background
        3. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
        4. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
        5. Influences

Section Menu

Organize

Learn

Connect

Multimedia

Norton Gradebook

Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.

Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.