Recommended Resources
Art, Music, and Film
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Altschuler, Glenn C. All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Halliwell, Martin. American Culture in the 1950s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitian Books, 2000.
Frum, David. How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse). New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Bloch, Avital H., and Lauri Umansky, eds. Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960’s. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
O’Connor, Sandra Day. Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. New York: Random House, 2002.
Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Glazer, Tom, comp. Songs of Peace, Freedom, and Protest. New York: D. McKay, 1970.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.
Young, William H. The 1950s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
May, Lary. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Super, John C., ed. The Fifties in America. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2005.
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Jones, John Bush. The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939–1945. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 2006.
Denisoff, R. Serge, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972.