University of Phoenix Material
The Fabulous Fifties Matrix
Choose ten items from the following list and identify their significance during the 1950s:
The Mickey Mouse Club
Interstate highways
Dishwashers
Automobiles
Hi-Fis and stereos
Poodle skirts
Drive-in theaters
Levittown
Dr. Spock
Ozzie and Harriett
I Love Lucy
Persistent poverty
Black urban migration
Urban renewal
Beatniks (beats)
American Bandstand
Elvis Presley
James Dean
Event
Significance
The Mickey Mouse Club house
The Mickey Mouse Club created a national
demand for related products such as Mickey Mouse watches
and hats. It also helped produce the stunning success of
Disneyland, an amusement park near Los Angeles that recreated
many of the characters and events of Disney entertainment
Programs (Brinkley, 2012).
Interstate highways
These highways dramatically reduced the time necessary to travel from one place to another. They also made trucking a more economical way than railroads to transport goods to markets. They made travel by automobile, truck, and bus as fast as or faster than travel by trains, resulting in the long, steady decline of railroads (Brinkley, 2012).
Levittown
The most famous of the postwar suburban developers, William Levitt, used new mass-production techniques to construct a large housing development
On Long Island, near New York City (Brinkley, 2012).
Dr. Spock
Dr. Spock’s approach to raising
babies was child-centered, as opposed to
Parent-centered. The purpose of motherhood, he taught,
was to help children learn and grow and realize their
Potential (Brinkley, 2012).
Elvis Presley
Presley became a symbol of a youthful determination to push at
The borders of the conventional and acceptable. His sultry good looks; his self-conscious effort to dress in the vaguely rebellious style of urban gangs (motorcycle
jackets and slicked-back hair); and most of all, the open
sexuality of his music and his public...