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PLEASE NOTE: ALL CITATIONS ARE IN MLA 7 FORMAT. THE PREFERRED FORMAT IS MLA 8. SEE OWL PURDUE FOR PROPER CITATIONS.
Books
Anderson, Terry. The Sixties. Boston: Pearson, 1998.
Terry Anderson tackles the question of why America experienced a full decade of tumult and change, the reverberations and consequences from which are still felt today. -Amazon
Brick, Howard. Age of Contradiction American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. New York : Twayne Publishers, 1998.
“Howard Brick has performed an important service and produced a remarkable book. . . . What Brick has done is to remind us of just how important ideas were in the 1960s and, equally important, to illustrate how these various threads of 1960s life―the political, the social, and the intellectual―all wound in and out of one another. . . . As a result, we cannot look back on the decade the same way ever again.”―Alexander Bloom, The Journal of American History. September, 1999. -Amazon
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. -Amazon
Coontz, Stephanie. “What we Really Miss about the 1950s.” In The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
She [Coontz] argues that while it’s not crazy to miss the more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years. Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and childrearing. -Amazon
Dyson, Freeman J. Disturbing the Universe. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Freeman Dyson has composed an autobiography unlike any other. Dyson evocatively conveys the thrill of a deep engagement with the world-be it as scientist, citizen, student, or parent. Detailing a unique career not limited to his groundbreaking work in physics, Dyson discusses his interest in minimizing loss of life in war, in disarmament, and even in thought experiments on the expansion of our frontiers into the galaxies. -Amazon
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. 40th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Warning against individual and societal complacence about economic inequity, he offers an economic model for investing in public wealth that challenges “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined that has since entered our vernacular) about the long-term value of a production-based economy and the true nature of poverty. Both politically divisive and remarkably prescient, The Affluent Society is as relevant today on the question of wealth in America as it was in 1958. -Amazon
Leach, William. Land of Desire Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America’s transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition. -Amazon
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
The Power Elite stands as a contemporary classic of social science and social criticism. C. Wright Mills examines and critiques the organization of power in the United States, calling attention to three firmly interlocked prongs of power: the military, corporate, and political elite. The Power Elite can be read as a good account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written, but its underlying question of whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory continues to matter very much today. -Amazon
Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.
Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
A study of 20th-century American society. Its now-classic analysis of the new middle class in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political and economic problems that confront the individual in society. -Amazon
Stanforth, Dierdre. Betty Crocker’s Hostess Cookbook. New York: Golden Press, 1974.
Leave it to Betty Crocker to come up with the first really practical book for women who want to entertain…more easily, more often, most successfully. -Book Cover
White Jr., William H. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. -Amazon
Articles
Beauchamp, Cari, and Judy Balban. “Cary in the Sky with Diamonds.” Vanity Fair, August 2010. Web. Accessed July 29, 2016.
Berrett, Jesse. “Feeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar America.” Journal of Social History 30.4 (1997): 805-25. Web.
Hamilton, Caroline. “Seeing the World Second Hand: Mad Men and the Vintage Consumer.” Cultural Studies Review 18.2 (2012): 223-41. ProQuest. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
Gregg, Melissa. “The Return of Organisation Man: Commuter Narratives and Suburban Critique.” Cultural Studies Review 18.2 (2012): 242-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 Aug. 2016.
The Good Life. Life. December 28,1959.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946- 1958.” The Journal of American History 79.4 (1993): 1455-482. Web.
Newman, David and Robert Benton. “The New Sentimentality.” Esquire. 31 (1964).
Nickles, Shelley. “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America.” American Quarterly 54.4 (2002): 581-622. Web.
Petigny, Alan. “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and new conceptions of the self in postwar America.” The Mailer Review 1.1 (2007): 184+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Aug. 2016.
Whiteley, Nigel. “Toward a Throw-Away Culture. Consumerism, ‘Style Obsolescence’ and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s.” Oxford Art Journal 10.2 (1987): 3-27. Web. Link below.
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