» The latest in the Legacy Publishing chronicle series is an irresistible journey through the affluent and anxiety ridden decade of the 1950?s. Anyone old enough to remember the fifties will find the era brought back to life with page after page of compelling insight and captivating photography. Those born too late will find a highly readable detailed portrait of another age that brought with it the Korean War, the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and Rock and Roll. » Over 900 stunning photographs to help capture the decade, most with in-depth captions (80-120 words). » Thematic essays provide the reader a better perspective for each year, including the Korean War (1951), The Civil Rights Movement (1955), The Arms Race (1957), and The Beat Generation (1959). » A 1,700-item timeline that captures all major events of the decade » Over 90 sidebars on a variety of topics such as the Joe Mcarthy witchunts, The Brown Vs. The Board of education civil rights case, Alfred Kinsey, The Quiz Show scandal, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Also included are rich first hand eyewitness accounts from those who were alive to witness the major events of the 1950's.

In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American. Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance. Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too. A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.

No other era in automotive history is as revered as the 1950s, when Detroit was the center of the auto world and the American V-8 was king of the road. With hundreds of color photos of beautiful restorations and a collection of rare archival photos, Dennis Adler has compiled a detailed history of the emerging postwar American auto industry.

Between the classic films of Walt Disney in the 1940s and the televised cartoon revolution of the 1960s was a critical period in the history of animation. Amid Amidi, of the influential Animation Blast magazine and CartoonBrew blog, charts the evolution of the modern style in animation, which largely discarded the "lifelike" aesthetic for a more graphic and often abstract approach. Abundantly found in commercials, industrial and educational films, fair and expo infotainment, and more, this quickly popular cartoon modernism shared much with the painting and graphic design movements of the era. Showcasing hundreds of rare and forgotten sketches, model boards, cels, and film stills, Cartoon Modern is a thoroughly researched, eye-popping, and delightful account of a vital decade of animation design.

A riveting history of the rise and fall of the obesity epidemic during 1950s and 1960s America. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company identified obesity as the leading cause of premature death in the United States in the 1930s, but it wasn't until 1951 that the public health and medical communities finally recognized it as "America's Number One Health Problem." The reason for MetLife's interest? They wanted their policyholders to live longer and continue paying their premiums. Early postwar America responded to the obesity emergency, but by the end of the 1960s, the crisis waned and official rates of true obesity were reduced— despite the fact that Americans were growing no thinner. What mid-century factors and forces established obesity as a politically meaningful and culturally resonant problem in the first place? And why did obesity fade from public—and medical—consciousness only a decade later? Based on archival records of health leaders as well as medical and popular literature, Fat in the Fifties is the first book to reconstruct the prewar origins, emergence, and surprising disappearance of obesity as a major public health problem. Author Nicolas Rasmussen explores the postwar shifts that drew attention to obesity, as well as the varied approaches to its treatment: from thyroid hormones to psychoanalysis and weight loss groups. Rasmussen argues that the US government was driven by the new Cold War and the fear of atomic annihilation to heightened anxieties about national fitness. Informed by the latest psychiatric thinking—which diagnosed obesity as the result of oral fixation, just like alcoholism—health professionals promoted a form of weight loss group therapy modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. The intervention caught on like wildfire in 1950s suburbia. But the sense of crisis passed quickly, partly due to cultural changes associated with the later 1960s and partly due to scientific research, some of it sponsored by the sugar industry, emphasizing particular dietary fats, rather than calorie intake. Through this riveting history of the rise and fall of the obesity epidemic, readers gain an understanding of how the American public health system—ambitious, strong, and second-to-none at the end of the Second World War—was constrained a decade later to focus mainly on nagging individuals to change their lifestyle choices. Fat in the Fifties is required reading for public health practitioners and researchers, physicians, historians of medicine, and anyone concerned about weight and weight loss.

Covers American cultural history, encompassing politics, science, arts, entertainment, and major events

Companion to the classic Yosemite in the Sixties, this book uses the words of the climbers of the time and artfully restored photographs to chronicle the historic first ascents of Yosemite's "mile-high" granite walls, the legendary personalities who risked their lives to climb them, and how their endeavors initiated the birth of adventure sports. Better than half a century after the first ascent of El Capitan, the deeds of Yosemite's 1950s-era Iron Age are no longer viewed as climbs or mere adventures. Rather, they are assaults on the human barrier, pushing that much higher. Yosemite in the Fifties gives the stage almost entirely over to the original source material, the first-person narratives, archive photos (artfully restored), and memorabilia particular to the seminal ascents of the era. These words, images, and design, when cast from critical angles, all reach across generations to resurrect vanished worlds. Yosemite in The Fifties is fashioned not so much as a book but as a wormhole back to an enchanted time in the history of exploration, and a classic era of Americana now lost in time.

Traces the history of the United States during the 1950s through such primary sources as memoirs, letters, contemporary journalism, and official documents.