Remember Ethel Mertz, Howdy Doody, Elvis Presley, Betty Furness? While popular culture characterizes the decade of the 1950s as “happy days” or even boring, David Halberstam argued in The Fifties that while “the fifties appear to be an orderly era with a minimum of dissent…[in fact] the era was a much more interesting one... that would enable a vast and surprisingly broad degree of dissidence.” Remember Matthew Ridgeway, Emmett Till, Robert Oppenheimer, Jack Kerouac? Using Halberstam’s book and our own personal experiences as the bases for discussion, we will revisit the fifties to look at how events helped to shape the succeeding eras of the Sixties through today, as well as consider how formative those events were for us as individuals.

Format: Class members will be expected to select a topic from the syllabus, or suggest a different topic, for a 15-20 minute presentation that will lead to an interesting class discussion.

Resources/Expenses: Text: The Fifties by David Halberstam, Villard Books, 1993. The book is available new ($15 - $25) or used ($5 and up) in either hardcover or softcover editions at many different booksellers, including your local independent bookstore.

Both coordinators grew up in the 50s!