The American Dream – The 50s Our American Century

Description

It was a wonderful time to be a child. Born after the war and brought up in an age of affluence, most boys and girls enjoyed the 1950s to the hilt. From dawn to dusk, especially in the new suburban neighborhoods filled with young families, the sounds of playing children filled the air. Girls, for the most part, favored jacks, hopscotch, or jumping rope to the steady chant of “Teddy bear, teddy bear,” or “Icka backa, soda cracker.” Boys played cowboys and Indians, or transformed themselves into ray-gun-toting spacemen who waged fierce space battles. For parents who had grown up during the grim Depression years, even the nosiest fun was usually sweet music to their ears.

A time capsule from those happy days when elementary schoolers played hide-and-seek outdoors until the sun went down The American Dream offers you the opportunity to look back at all the people who make the 1950s what they were. At a lovable redhead who became a top star of television’s golden age. At a young black minister who used his eloquence to battle for civil rights. At a baseball manager whose unique way of fracturing the language caame to be known as Stengelese. At a war-hero president who made golf the latest crazee–and at a Soviet leader who said, “We will bury you.” Recall Sputnik, Korea, the baby boom, and other events, and see how they defined who we are today. And revisit that time when car shoppers had their choice of Parisian blue, Tampa turquoise, and other fantasy colors, and $4,711 was all it took to drive the ultimate dream car, a new Cadillac, off the lot.

The editors of Time-Life Books left no stone unturned in telling our story in The American Dream. In addition to combing through the archives of Time, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines, they visited antique shops spoke to collectors, contacted manufacturers and government agencies, and toured museums as big as the Smithsonian Institution and as small as Ohio’s Wyandot Popcorn Museum. The resulting book, containing hundreds of pictures and countless quotations from the period, evokes the look and feel, the dreams and fears, the hopes and joys, of the nostalgic, nifty ’50s.