Karen Dunak
Teaching the Many Americas
of the 1950s
E
ach time I teach the survey of U.S. history since 1877, I show
students A Date with Your Family, a short film produced in 1950.
Highlighting an idealized vision of family life during the early
post–World War II years, the film encourages teenagers to view dining at home with the family as a great joy and privilege. Much like the
fictional Cleaver clan of Leave It to Beaver, the family members embrace
their assigned roles and enjoy a version of domestic nuclear family
bliss (1). Is this film corny? You bet. Students laugh at the exaggerated
niceties of the film’s prescriptive family unit, but their post-viewing
analysis has been fascinating.
The majority of students grew up less than two hours from our
small liberal arts university in southeastern Ohio. Many are first-generation college students, and they tend toward fairly conservative political
views. And yet discussions of A Date with Your Family have revealed
divisions within this relatively homogenous student body. Some students identified with the family values espoused by the film. Their
families, they assured me, were very much like the nuclear family presented in the movie. When they lived at home they would eat dinner
at the same time every night. Gender roles were fairly similar. Their
parents were the accepted authority figures. Other students viewed
the film with a more critical eye. They used words like “robotic” and
“cookie cutter” and “zombies” to describe the family. They charged
that no family was that “perfect.” Or, at least, that no family was that
perfect now. Back in the 1950s, they suggested, when people believed
in the traditional family, some families maybe were like the one featured in the film (2).
Discussions about A Date with Your Family encouraged an explanation and exploration of cultural ideals as opposed to lived realities. We
examined the roles of race, class, politics, and region in the portrayal
of this fictional family. Student comments got me wondering what it
was that shaped their preconceptions about the 1950s. How could I get
at the root of their perceptions? These questions deserved more attention than we could give them in the introductory survey, so I created a
course that aimed to answer these questions over an entire semester.
More than any other class I’d designed to that point, “1950s America”
seemed the most likely to teach not only the content of the topic at hand
but also the essential goal of developing students’ historical thinking
skills (3). This article provides an overview of the design and execution
of the course.
Building the Course
The inspiration from the survey shaped the organization of the course.
Students would critically engage with the idealized 1950s, the realities
of lived experience during the decade, and the ways the history of the
1950s had become memory. With that in mind, I divided the course
into three sections: The American Way of Life, Alternative Ways of Life,
and Remembering the 1950s. For the first part of the course, students
examine evidence that supports an idealistic view of 1950s America.
They focus on ideas about consensus and contentment that play to
their expectation of the period. In the second section they explore evidence that challenges this ideal—civil rights activism, Cold War anxieties, resistance to normative gender roles and sexual behaviors, youth
cultural rebellion, and critical views of cultural conformity. The final
third aims to reveal preconceptions of the period and how they came
to be. This last section traces the evolution of American memory of
the decade—from a fairly critical view of the 1950s in the immediate
aftermath of the 1960s to the more nostalgic view that developed in the
1970s and has continued into the twenty-first century.
As a whole, the course is concerned with three questions: What
was the American Way of Life and how was it communicated across
American culture? What were the inconsistencies and limitations of
the American Way of Life? and Why has popular memory of the American Way of Life, and the 1950s as a whole, changed over time? Having
a specific question for each section of the course, each focused on a
singular concept, helps students think deeply about an idea referred
to time and again in assigned readings, class discussions, and source
analysis. At the same time, course organization and focus encourages
them to think critically and comparatively about people, events, and
ideas that existed simultaneously but differed dramatically (4).
Beyond student interest and positive response to the subject, my
inspiration for this course and its organization came from another
observation I had while teaching other courses. As an important historical thinking skill, comparison proved difficult for many students.
They struggled to identify differences between one point of view and
another. They could not intertwine evaluations of sources, arguments,
or ideas. I often found myself reading student responses that would
describe one source, and then another, but give no real explanation of
how they were different and why. The structure of the 1950s course
demands that students spend such an extended amount of time studying one idea—in this case, the American Way of Life—that when an
alternative to the ideal is presented, the difference is obvious. Because
of the time spent developing this ideal, comparison of experiences
against it are clearer and more striking than they might be otherwise.
Throughout the semester, students complete analyses of assigned
sources, both primary and secondary. They write several paragraphs
about the source, including a summary, a critical analysis (author,
audience, argument, intent), and a discussion of where the source fits
with our definition of the American Way of Life. In this consideration
of where a source fits, students are encouraged to pair the assigned
source with those we have already read, either as a support or a challenge to ideas previously established in class. At the end of each third
of the course, students write an essay to answer the motivating question for that section. Students can rely on the source analyses they have
completed over the course of the semester as they write their larger
OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 13–16
doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oas032
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essays. Thinking about the sources
in conversation with one another
allows for a greater integration
of source material as well as a
greater engagement of historians’
arguments and primary source
evidence.
Similarly, the Cleavers provide
a tangible example of the ideal
family. The episode we watch in
class, “Ward’s Problem,” highlights the privileged nature of the
Cleavers’s lives. It seems that Ward
has double-booked his weekend,
promising Wally a fishing trip and
committing to Beaver’s studentfather school picnic. The episode
chronicles his efforts to please
both boys. Clearly, Ward’s “problem” is easily solved. The show
suggests that these are the kinds
of problems a typical family might
face. Money is no object. The children respect their elders. The family exists in perfect harmony, and
each member appears entirely
content with his or her role. The
“problem” faced is how to attain
the pinnacle of 1950s family life:
togetherness (6).
Un-teaching the Harmonious
1950s
During the first third of the course,
as we focus on the construction
of an idealized American Way of
Life, we talk extensively about the
construction of the postwar suburb and suburban culture. A key
source is a July 1950 Time magazine feature article on William
Levitt and the development of
Levittown, New York. Highlighting Levitt’s background, wartime
experience, and business savvy, the
article also points to the necessity
of government-business cooperation in the building of the postLimitations of the Ideal
war suburban community and
These representations serve as
the enthusiastic response Levitt’s
perfect foils for the second section
creation received. While celebratof the course. Among the most
ing the opportunities provided by
successful and eye-opening topLevittown, the article also reveals
ics is the civil rights movement.
the anxieties of the moneyed set Figure 1. ​A young African American resident of Little Rock, Arkansas, watches Generally, students have some sort
of Long Island, who feared the in August 1959 as a march to protest the reopening of the public schools on a of background on the topic, but
eventual decline of Levittown into racially integrated basis passes through his neighborhood. The emergence of a their familiarity is typically with
“future slums.” Even at the peak mass civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, as well as the bitter and violent the famed figures of the freedom
opposition it generated, unsettle students’ preconceived notions of the decade
of suburban development’s popu- and its supposedly shared American Way of Life. (Courtesy of Library of Congress) struggle: Martin Luther King Jr.,
larity, there were concerns that
Rosa Parks, Malcolm X. We disthose pre-planned neighborhoods
cuss impediments to full attainand cookie-­cutter houses could lead citizens to a troubling conformment of the American Way of Life based on racial discrimination and
ity. Along with reading the article from Time, students analyze adverJim Crow segregation. I remind students that the murder of Emmett
tisements from contemporary periodicals, investigate government
Till took place in the same nation where a newly democratized middleprograms, e­ valuate early television commercials, critique propaganda
class population was heading to the suburbs (7). Ward Cleaver and his
films designed to promote a newly constructed shopping mall, and
family served as American role models and entertained millions while
consider how sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver worked in tandem to
nine African American students faced angry mobs as they attempted to
craft an ­idealized version of American life. Students comprehend that
desegregate Little Rock’s Central High School (Figure 1). Having estaba multitude of influences contributed to create a cultural standard to
lished the idea of the American Way of Life during the first section of
which many Americans aspired. The American Way of Life was not
the course, these limitations of the ideal are particularly striking.
some organic entity: it was a consciously crafted lifestyle, shaped by
Students’ understanding of the 1950s as the “boring” decade of
government, business, and media. And, as the Time article indicates,
conformity is shaken when they consider the many and multilayered
it was not without its ­critics—even at its most celebrated moment (5).
experiences of Americans during this period. Multiple students have
In my experiences teaching the course, Levittown and Leave It to
commented that they think of the civil rights movement as a phenomBeaver ultimately come to serve as metaphors for the suburban and
enon of the 1960s, the far more exciting decade of social revolution (8).
familial components of the American Way of Life. These specific examThe second section of the course is marked by the stirrings that would
ples of a suburb and a nuclear family—as they “should” be, accorderupt in “the Sixties.” Women engaged publicly and politically as they
ing to the culture—are referenced time and again by students over the
protested the American policies of the nuclear age (9). Members of
duration of the course. Using the Time article and Levittown images,
the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis aimed to decriminalstudents gain a sense of the intended order of a suburb’s layout. They
ize and legitimize homosexuality (10). Hugh Hefner, a perennial class
identify the motivation behind the rules and regulations set forth to
favorite, rejected the family-man style of masculinity and popularized
keep the community looking neat and uniform. They are familiar with
the swinging single so celebrated in the pages of Playboy (see John
the youth of the population and the focus on the nuclear-family unit.
­Bodnar’s article in this issue) (11). Evidence of the freedom struggle,
They evaluate the government’s role in promoting these communities,
Cold War critiques, and alternative genders and sexualities complicates
and they understand the appeal of home ownership for those who had
students’ understanding not only of the 1950s but also the decade and
survived the Great Depression and World War II.
decades that followed (and, ideally, all historical periods).
14 OAH Magazine of History • October 2012
The idea of events occurring in simultaneity is fundamental to students’ development as historians. At the conclusion of the second third
of the course and start of the third, I’ve tended to pause and ask students to assess what we’ve learned. While students’ written efforts indicate their understanding that historians shape historical arguments by
their selection of evidence, their points of emphasis, and their engagement with other historians, class discussions have proved even better
evidence of students’ understanding of history as “the study of the past”
rather than merely “the past.” When I taught the course during the
spring 2011 semester, I had potentially the most affirming moment of
my teaching life when I commented that there are many students who
enter history classes believing there is a singular version of the past.
Following my remarks, the students in my class heaved heavy sighs
and rolled their eyes at such a ridiculous sentiment.
Popular Memory
The memory section of the course has proven to be the most challenging. Considering how views of the past have changed requires
consideration of the events of subsequent decades. To some degree,
this contextualizing adds another complex layer to students’ historical
­considerations. It challenges students’ long-ingrained belief that history
is unchanging. In their final papers, students tend to highlight the nostalgic memory of 1950s and skip the more critical perspective of 1960s
liberals and increasingly leftward leaning youth (12). While considerations of the American Way of Life and its alternatives lend themselves
to direct comparison, the evolution of American memory has proven
more difficult for students to master. In future offerings of the course, I
will highlight this evolution more during the final weeks of the semester
in writing and in class discussion. In the past I have assigned a single
standard format for source analysis assignments, but for future courses
I will create templates specific to each third of the course with hopes of
helping students better identify and analyze the themes driving each
section.
This final section of the course is in many ways the most important
for students as they prepare to leave the classroom. Public and family
memory, museums and memorials, and fictional presentations of the
past are among the most likely sites in which students will confront
history and its presentations in their postcollegiate lives. Modeling a
method of critical thinking, in the world of media and entertainment
most particularly, provides students with a chance to continue their
roles as historians.
When we watch Pleasantville (1998), a film in which siblings of
the late 1990s are transported back to the world of a fictional 1950s
town, the students are confronted with a critical memory of the
1950s, but one in which race or “color” is addressed only metaphorically. Conformity and contentment prevent the black-and-white citizens of Pleasantville from seeing the beauty and passion and danger
of life with color. Class discussion allowed us to explore how the
film played into preconceptions of the blandness of the 1950s even
as it critiqued media portrayals of the decade. Simultaneously, the
film presented a very specific and fairly critical view of the 1990s,
leading students to consider how memory is often more a product
of the present than the past (13). In a course evaluation, one student
commented that Pleasantville was an effective “link. [I] really got it in
relation to the class.” The student also noted that the “class was very
helpful in understanding the 1950s mentality and what the decades
following had to say.”
Conclusion
Even as memories of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s presented the 1950s
as a simpler time, the students’ investigation of the varied experiences
of the period during the second section of the course allowed them to
develop a critical perspective of recent memories. In the aftermath of
the course, students reported continued encounters with the many and
varied constructions of history. As one student told me, she engaged
in heated discussion at home when an older relative asserted that the
1950s were a better, easier time—a discussion that ultimately revealed
competing memories among members of the same family. That students leave the class with a sense of the constructed and c­ontested
nature of history is no small victory.
Beyond developing the 1950s course, I’ve taken the lessons of
simultaneity, comparison, and debate and applied them across other
classes, especially my survey of U.S. history since 1877. Beyond the
1950s, for as many topics as possible, I present alternate perspectives
of select periods. When teaching the 1920s, I stress the newness of
this modern decade, as technological advances shaped a mass culture
that challenged traditional values and mores. Likewise, I emphasize
the ways those uneasy with these challenges aimed to reassert their
influence, be it through renewed commitment to a more conservative
Christianity, adoption of increasingly nativist views, or the promotion
of the prohibition of alcohol. Students must determine whether the
decade marked a transformation or a continuation of American culture and values. Problematizing how we view a decade or an era helps
students understand the importance of evidence selection to the historian’s craft. It reveals the many and multi-layered experiences of those
in the past. And perhaps most importantly, it helps them consider how
arguments and viewpoints are developed across time and how we must
engage with various histories rather than a single, indisputable version
of the past. q
Endnotes
1.A Date with Your Family, directed by Edward C. Simmel (United States:
Simmel­-Meservey, 1950). Available at http://archive.org/details/DateWith
1950.
2. On the popular memory of 1950s families, see Stephanie Coontz, The Way
We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic
Books, 2000).
3. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the
Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
4.At the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, I
attended a workshop on “Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.” The first
session, “How to Create an Undergraduate Course,” with presentations by
Lendol Calder, Kevin Kenny, Stefan Tanaka, and Janice Reiff, fundamentally
shaped my approach to course organization and the learning goals I hope
students will achieve by a course’s conclusion.
5. “Up from the Potato Fields,” Time, July 3, 1950. On persisting class divisions during the postwar years, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf,
2003), 193–278.
6.“Ward’s Problem,” Leave It to Beaver, season 2, episode 3, directed by
Norman Tokar (October 16, 1958; Los Angeles: Universal Studios,
­
2006). DVD. On “togetherness,” see Jessica Weiss, To Have and to Hold:
Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (Chicago: University of C
­ hicago
Press, 2000).
7.American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till, directed by Stanley Nelson
(2003; Arlington: PBS, 2004). DVD.
8. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and Political Uses
of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–63.
9. Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest
Movement in New York City, 1955–1961,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and
Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 201–28.
10. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 9–109.
11. Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from
Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 42–51; Elizabeth Fraterrigio, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
OAH Magazine of History • October 2012 15
12. On memory of the 1950s and 1960s, see Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and
Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
13. Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross (1998; Los Angeles: New Line Home
Video, 2004). DVD.
Karen Dunak is assistant professor of history at Muskingum University in
New Concord, Ohio. Her scholarly interests include the post–World War
II history of American traditions and celebrations, gender and citizenship,
youth culture and activism, and media and celebrity. Her first book, As
Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America,
will be published by New York University Press in 2013.
16 OAH Magazine of History • October 2012