1. Conservative writers are particularly fond of contrasting the 1950s and 1960s. For two of many influential evocations of the fifties and sixties from the Right, see Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984)Google Scholar; and Magnet, Myron, The Nightmare and the Dream: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993)Google Scholar. One of many Left critiques of the 1950s is Jezer, Marty, The Dark Ages: Life in the U.S., 1945–1960 (Boston: South End, 1983).Google Scholar

2. A wistful evocation of the 1950s can be found in Halberstam, David, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993)Google Scholar. The titles of some recent histories of the 1950s and 1960s are paticularly revealing: Diggins, John Patrick, The Proud Decades (New York: Norton, 1988)Google Scholar; O'Neill, William, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Oakley, J. Ronald, God's Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner, 1986)Google Scholar. Contrast with histories of the 1960s, such as Matusow, Allen, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; O'Neill, William L., Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971)Google Scholar; Morris, Charles R., A Time of Passion (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; and Blum, John Morton, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961–1974 (New York: Norton, 1991).Google Scholar

3. A perceptive review of recent scholarship on the 1950s that has influenced my thinking on this topic is Echols, Alice, “Fiftysomething,” Village Voice, 09 20, 1994, 86–88Google Scholar. Other synthetic essays that attempt to complicate narratives of postwar America are Chafe, William, “Postwar American Society: Dissent and Social Reform,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey, Michael J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Warren Susman, with the assistance of Griffin, Edward, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19–37.Google Scholar

4. The literature on McCarthyism is voluminous. Succinct overviews are Schrecker, Ellen, The Age of McCarthyism (New York: Bedford, 1994)Google Scholar; and Fried, Richard, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For views of McCarthyism and other conservative movements as irrational phenomena, see Bell, Daniel, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955)Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar. On the culture of anticommunism, see Whitfield, Stephen, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. On Catholic anticommunism, see Rosswurm, Steven, “The Catholic Church and the Left-Led Unions: Labor Priests, Labor Schools, and the ACTU,” in The CIO's Left-Led Unions, ed. Rosswurm, S. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 119–37Google Scholar; and Crosby, Donald, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978)Google Scholar. On the political opportunism of anticommunists, see Freeland, Richard, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar. On McCarthyism and congressional politics, see Griffith, Robert, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).Google Scholar

5. Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).Google Scholar

6. Dawley, Alan, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

7. Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

8. On the racial limitations of federal policy, see especially Quadagno, Jill, “From Old Age Assistance to Supplemental Security Income: The Political Economy of Relief in the South, 1935–1972,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 235–63Google Scholar. On unwed motherhood, see Barron, Dana, “‘Illegitimately Pregnant:’ Unwed Motherhood and Poverty in Philadelphia, 1920–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995)Google Scholar. On ADC and welfare, see Bell, Winifred, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Gordon, Linda, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).Google Scholar

9. On agricultural poverty, see Jones, Jacqueline, The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic, 1992)Google Scholar; see also Daniel, Pete, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life Since 1900 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).Google Scholar

10. Every major Northern and Midwestern city lost jobs in the 1950s. For a concise summary, see Kasarda, John, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in The New Urban Reality, ed. Peterson, Paul (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1986), 43–47Google Scholar, esp. tables 1 and 2. On industrial decline, see Sugrue, Thomas J., “The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in the Three Periods of American History,” in The ‘Underclass’ Debate: Views from History, ed. Katz, Michael B. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85–117Google Scholar; Cumbler, John, A Social History of Economic Decline (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: A History of Labor in a Textile City, 1920–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 318–30Google Scholar. On the electrical industry, see Schatz, Ronald W., The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 232–37.Google Scholar

11. Figures from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), 452.Google Scholar

12. The best introduction to the range of activities of Left-led unions is Rosswurm, Steve, “An Overview and Assessment of the CIO's Expelled Unions,”Google Scholar in Rosswurm, S., CIO's Left-Led Unions, 1–17Google Scholar; Sugrue, Thomas J., “‘Forget About Your Inalienable Right to Work:’ Deindustrialization and Its Discontents at Ford, 1950–1953,” International Labor and Working-Class History 48 (Fall, 1995), 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schatz, , Electrical Workers, 167–243.Google Scholar

13. Isserman, Maurice, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic, 1987)Google Scholar; Brown, Lloyd, Iron City (1952), reprinted with an introduction by Alan Wald (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Swados, Harvey, On the Line (1957), reprinted with an introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Denby, Charles, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal (1956; rept. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

14. For examples, see Wald, Alan, “Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War,” Prospects 20 (1995):479–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar (in this volume); Buhle, Paul, “The 1950s and 1960s: Open and Hidden Relations,” Prospects 20 (1995):467–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar (in this volume); Rosswurm, , CIO's Left-Led UnionsGoogle Scholar; and Schatz, , Electrical Workers, 167–243Google Scholar. On the marginalization of proletarian novelists, see Foley, Barbara, “Renarrating the Thirties in the Forties and Fifties,” Prospects 20 (1995):455–66 (in this volume).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Hartmann, Susan, “Woman's Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Meyerowitz, Joanne (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 84–100Google Scholar. A sweeping survey of family and gender roles in the 20th Century, with particular attention to stereotypical depictions of the postwar family, is Coontz, Stephanie, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic, 1992)Google Scholar. Figures from Chafe, , “Postwar American Society,” 170.Google Scholar

16. Stern, Mark, “Poverty and Family Composition,”Google Scholar in Katz, , ‘Underclass’ Debate, 236–38.Google Scholar

17. Bao, Xiaolan, “When Women Arrived: The Transformation of New York's Chinatown,”Google Scholar in Meyerowite, , Not June Cleaver, 19–36Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Automobile Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

18. On Queens, see Murray, Sylvie, “Suburban Citizens: Domesticity and Community Politics in Queens, New York, 1945–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994)Google Scholar. On Detroit, see Sugrue, Thomas J., “Crabgrassroots Politics: Race, Homeownership, and Anti-Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 561–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Chicago, see Hirsch, Arnold, Making a Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. 195–96.Google Scholar

19. Brienes, Wini, “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,”Google Scholar in Meyerowitz, , Not June Cleaver, 399–400Google Scholar; and Graebner, William, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

20. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Davis, Madeline, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Stein, Marc, “The City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: The Making of Lesbian and Gay Movements in Greater Philadelphia, 1948–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994)Google Scholar; Berube, Allan, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990)Google Scholar; D'Emilio, John, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17–85Google Scholar; and D'Emilio, 's pathbreaking, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar

21. Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Goldin, Claudia, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kessler-Harris, Alice, A Women's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990).Google Scholar

22. A, James GilbertCycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Graebner, , Coming of Age.Google Scholar

23. Bailey, Beth, “Sexual Revolution(s),” in The Sixties from Memory to History, ed. Farber, David (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 235–62Google Scholar; and Solinger, Rickie, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (New York: Free Press, 1994).Google Scholar

24. Gerstle, Gary, “The Working Class Goes to War,” Mid-America 75 (10 1993): 303–22.Google Scholar On Americanism and whiteness, see Sugrue, , “Crabgrassroots Politics,” 551–78.Google Scholar

25. Nelson, Bruce, “Class, Race, and Democracy in the CIO: The ‘New’ Labor History Meets the ‘Wages of Whiteness’,” International Review of Social HistoryGoogle Scholar (Forthcoming); Sugrue, , “Crabgrassroots Politics”Google Scholar; Boyle, Kevin, “There Are No Union Sorrows That the Union Can't Heal: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United Automobile Workers, 1940–1960,” Labor History 36 (1995): 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Graebner, , Coming of Age, 120–26.Google Scholar

26. “Constable Sells Home to Negro — Picketed,” Michigan Chronicle, 08 21, 1948.Google Scholar Other incidents are discussed in Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Inequality in Postwar DetroitGoogle Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Forthcoming), ch. 9; see also Hirsch, , Making the Second Ghetto.Google Scholar

27. Gilbert, , Cycle of Outrage, 7.Google Scholar

28. Lears, Jackson, “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass Consumption Society,”Google Scholar in May, , Recasting America, 38–57.Google Scholar

29. Galbraith, John Kenneth, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952)Google Scholar, and The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)Google Scholar; Potter, David, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Boorstin, Daniel, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1958).Google Scholar For a critical overview of consensus historiography, see Higham, John, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 212–32.Google Scholar

30. Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).Google Scholar

31. Hayden, Tom, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988)Google Scholar; Levy, Peter B., The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Buhle, Paul, ed., History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar A number of historians took up the theme of American exceptionalism, particularly the “new urban historians” who examined social mobility. See for example, Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, which discusses the themes of “social control” and the “politics of consensus” in its discussion of 19th-century Newburyport, Massachusetts. Illuminating are the essays in Laslett, John H. M. and Lipset, Seymour Martin, eds., The Failure of a Dream (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).Google Scholar

32. The most influential work on resistance and politics in this period is Lipsitz, George, Class and Culture in the Cold War: A Rainbow at Midnight, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).Google Scholar Some of the earliest revisionist essays, focusing particularly on popular culture, can be found in May, Recasting America, esp. chs. 10–14.Google Scholar See also the important rethinking of gender and domesticity in the 1950s by contributors to Meyerowitz, , Not June CleaverGoogle Scholar; and the pathbreaking essays on infrapolitical resistance and oppositional popular culture in Kelley, Robin D. G., Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), esp. chs. 3 and 7.Google Scholar

33. Important steps in this direction are Griffith, Robert, “Forging America's Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman,”Google Scholar in Lacey, , Truman Presidency, 57–88Google Scholar; and Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).Google Scholar

34. Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loic J. D., An Introduction to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17–18.Google Scholar

35. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Uses of the ‘People’,” in In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Adamson, Matthew (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1990), 150–55.Google Scholar As Bourdieu has argued, “Resistance may be alienating and submission may be liberating. Such is the paradox of the dominated, and there is no way out of it” (155). See also Bourdieu, and Wacquant, , Introduction to Reflexive Sociology, 79–83.Google Scholar

36. See Buhle, Paul, “The 1950s and the 1960s: Open and Hidden Relations,” Prospects 20 (1995):467–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar