1950s America
A01=James R. Gaines
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
age of eisenhower
amity shlaes
Author_James R. Gaines
automatic-update
biography-driven history
Black freedom struggle
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGH
Category=DNBH
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
character portraits
civil rights movement
civil rights movement origins
Cold War America
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Eisenhower era
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
feminism
feminist movement
Frank Kameny
frederik logevall
Gerda Lerner
grassroots activism
great society
hidden history
jfk
Jr.
Language_English
Martin Luther King
McCarthy era
Medger Evers
midcentury United States
nixonland
PA=Available
pioneers
postwar America
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
reaganland
revisionist history
rick perlstein
roaring sixties
sexual freedom
social history
social justice history
softlaunch
the fifties
time magazine
underground history
William Hitchcok
women&rsquo
Product details
- ISBN 9781439101636
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Apr 2022
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A bold and original argument that upends the myth of the Fifties as a decade of conformity to celebrate the solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines.
In a fascinating and beautifully written series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals—people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts—who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet the legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her “in between” sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsberg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination illegal, but that was only one of her gifts to 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay-rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book’s unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring’s Rachel Carson and MIT’s preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives—she in the living world, he in the theoretical one—converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement.
The Fifties is a dazzling and provocative work of history that transforms our understanding of a seemingly staid decade and honors the pioneers of gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism. The book carries the powerful message that change actually begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of de-centered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.
In a fascinating and beautifully written series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals—people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts—who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet the legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her “in between” sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsberg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination illegal, but that was only one of her gifts to 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay-rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book’s unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring’s Rachel Carson and MIT’s preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives—she in the living world, he in the theoretical one—converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement.
The Fifties is a dazzling and provocative work of history that transforms our understanding of a seemingly staid decade and honors the pioneers of gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism. The book carries the powerful message that change actually begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of de-centered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.
James R. Gaines is the former managing editor of Time and the author of several books, including Evening in the Palace of Reason, a study of Johann Sebastian Bach and the early Enlightenment, and For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.
