header by Emerson Taymor, 2005


1. The Colonial Era: 1607-1763

2. The Revolutionary Era: 1763-1789

3. The Early National Period: 1789-1824

4. Jacksonian America: 1824-1848

5. Antebellum America: 1848-1860

6. The Civil War Era: 1861-1877

7. The Gilded Age: 1877-1901

8. Progressivism: 1901-1920

9. The Twenties

10. Depression and New Deal: 1929-1939

11. World War II: 1939-1945

12. Early Cold War: 1945-1963

13. Social Ferment: 1945-1960

14. The Sixties

15. The Seventies and After

 

 

 


Social Ferment, 1945-1960

Council Against Intolerance in America, map of American diversity (1940); Daniel Schorr, Reconverting Mexican Americans (1946); "So Much for So Little," US government-sponsored short from 1949 explaining why government-sponsored health care is a good thing

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette visits a negro school, 1947; Septima Clark recalls teaching in segregated schools; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette visits sharecroppers, 1947; examples of The "Green Book," which described places for African-American travelers to stay during segregation; NPR covers the story

race and the GI bill

Report of the President's Commission on Civil Rights (1947)

Harry Truman, address to NAACP, 1947; Southern response to Truman

Party platforms, 1948

sample Mississippi ballot, 1948

Brown v. Board of Ed. decision (1954); Brown II, 1955; Southern declaration on integration (1956); a letter to the New Orleans Times-Picayune complaining that only African-American children enjoy school choice, 1957; Jet magazine on progress in education, 1955; Asher Price, "A Secret 1950s Strategy to Keep Out Black Students," Atlantic (2019)--how U. Texas used standardized testing to slow integration

Law professors on what Brown means, or should mean, or might have meant; The Atlantic covers the decision; the ironic consequences of Brown for Central High School's football team; desegregation in six school districts, 1968-2010; Gary Kamiya on how white East Bay residents fought against integration in the 40s and 50s, Chronicle (Nov. 2018)

selections from the Oakland Tribune, Mar. 23, 1956

famous court cases, some with digitized recordings of the actual case

consumer spending patterns, 1930s-onward; midcentury photos of San Francisco; Life magazine describes the teenage market (1959); images of 50s pop culture

Gene Slater, "The Inventors of America's Most Dangerous Idea," The Atlantic (Nov. 2021): how realtors turned "freedom" into a defense of segregation; Bill Owens's Sururbia, a famous photo series set in Livermore: is it mocking? celebratory? both? One of the more resonant images of assimilation, whose politics are still debated

women and gender roles in the 50s; "129 Ways to Get a Husband," McCall's (1958)

"The Story of a Plain Woman Who Is Considered a Beauty," Vogue (1958)

on postwar residential segregation and the roots of what happened in Ferguson (2016)

postwar urban planning and the decline of mass transit (CityLab)