1950s
How 'Project Blue Book' Production Designers Evoked the Golden Age of UFOs
To transport “Project Blue Book” viewers into the top-secret world of the U.S. government’s Cold War-era U.F.O. investigations, production designer Ross Dempster and his team were tasked with conjuring a moment in time—from scratch. The drama series, in its first season on ...read more
The First Birth Control Pill Used Puerto Rican Women as Guinea Pigs
It came in a brown bottle, marketed as a safe way for married women to treat menstrual disorders. But the contents of that little brown bottle were as potent as a bomb. Inside was Enovid, the world’s first birth control pill. Soon, Enovid would usher in a new era of sexual ...read more
How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education
Dolls are for kids. So why were they in front of the most esteemed judges in the United States? As they deliberated on Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that eventually overturned “separate-but-equal” segregation in the United States, the Supreme Court Justices ...read more
Inside the Rise and Fall of Toys ‘R’ Us
It was 1948, and Charles Lazarus had a hunch. Newly returned from World War II, he knew he wanted to go into business, and he knew—long before the term “baby boom” was a common phrase—that his friends were about to start having lots of babies. “Everyone I talked to said they ...read more
Why Elvis Presley Isn’t the King to Millennials
Millennials, it turns out, aren’t all shook up about Elvis. (Most of them wouldn’t even get the reference.) According to a news story that drew on the results of a poll of 2,034 Britons by YouGov, an Internet-based market research firm, 29 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds had never ...read more
The Green Book: The Black Travelers’ Guide to Jim Crow America
“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we ...read more
7 Fascinating Facts About Elvis Presley
1. Elvis had a twin. On January 8, 1935, Elvis Aron (later spelled Aaron) Presley was born at his parents’ two-room house in East Tupelo, Mississippi, about 35 minutes after his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn. The next day, Jesse was buried in an unmarked ...read more
The 1950s
The 1950s were a decade marked by the post-World War II boom, the dawn of the Cold War and the civil rights movement in the United States. “America at this moment,” said the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945, “stands at the summit of the world.” During the ...read more
Red Scare
The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Communists were often referred to as “Reds” for their allegiance to the ...read more
The Interstate Highway System
On June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of ...read more
Baby Boomers
Almost exactly nine months after World War II ended, “the cry of the baby was heard across the land,” as historian Landon Jones later described the trend. More babies were born in 1946 than ever before: 3.4 million, 20 percent more than in 1945. This was the beginning of the ...read more
Bill Haley and the Comets record “Rock Around The Clock”
On April 12, 1954— Bill Haley and His Comets recorded “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock.” If rock and roll was a social and cultural revolution, then “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” was its Declaration of Independence. And if Bill Haley was not exactly the revolution’s ...read more
Hawaii becomes 50th state
The modern United States receives its crowning star when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a proclamation admitting Hawaii into the Union as the 50th state. The president also issued an order for an American flag featuring 50 stars arranged in staggered rows: five six-star ...read more
“A Streetcar Named Desire” opens on Broadway
On December 3, 1947, Marlon Brando’s famous cry of “STELLA!” first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. The 23-year-old Brando played the ...read more
HUAC
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War (1945-91). Established in 1938, the committee wielded its subpoena power as a ...read more