Notes

3/1/2016
Do Now: Order
the events,
then set up
your notes

Life in the 1950s

Key Terms:
subversive something that undermines the

authority of an established institution

suburbs residential communities outside of
cities
conformity behaving as society expects

Announcements
Parent Letter
Quiz Tracker

I Love Lucy
Observe this clip as a historian. What
does this teach us about the 1950s?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzL
BSBzPI

What was it like to live in the

1950s?

What was it like to live in the

1950s?

Veterans Come Home

GI Bill of Rights, 1944

low-cost mortgages,
low-interest loans to start a business,
paid tuition for college,
one full year of unemployment

Baby Boom huge rise in birthrate, 1945-1960

Federal Interstate Highway Act (1956) built modern
highway system, made construction of suburbs possible
Whites move to the suburbs, people of color increasingly
crowded in urban ghettos

Veterans Come Home

Levittown first
planned housing
development,
entirely white

Rise of Religion
2/3 of Americans involved in religion highest
number ever
Rev. Billy Graham led popular evangelical
revivals
Addition of one nation under God to pledge
and In God We Trust to currency (1954)

Great Migration
Great Migration from WWI through 1950s,
blacks moved North
By 1960, half of all African-Americans lived in
northern cities
Invention of new cotton picking machines made
sharecropping obsolete

1950s Culture
Ideal of nuclear family,
conformity, traditional
gender roles
Spread of TV
Elvis Presley & Rock n
Roll white performers,
traditionally black styles
Beatniks counterculture
literature, protested
against conformist culture

Check for Understanding

Describe the dominant white culture of the
1950s
What minority, subversive, or dissenting
cultures also existed in the 1950s?

Document Analysis