March, 2012 Scholar of the Month: Sarah Schrank of CSU Long Beach

Topic: The Impact of the Cold War in America

Dr. Schrank explored the major cultural and social trends of a notorious decade marked by strategies of containment, a culture of consumption, an expanded middle-class, and a newly defined youth generation. Much of the historical literature produced in the 1970s, and 1980s tended to characterize the fifties as a “culture of conformity.” This was a historiographical response to the repressive nature of Cold War domestic policy and the reification of traditional gender norms as depicted in advertising and television, a new cultural medium. While patterns of suburbanization and racial segregation did inequitably divide many American cities, and promote the consolidation of what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called a “consumer’s republic,” many 1950s scholars have subsequently argued that there was much more going on under the surface than we might realize. Historians in the past ten years have thus returned to the 1950s to reexamine the complex sexual, racial, and cultural meanings of rock and roll, Beat art and poetry, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, among many other icons and cultural phenomena of the era.