28
CH 28 STUDY GUIDE THE SUBURBAN ERA
PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS
1. The automobile culture of mobility
2. The 1950s & the automobile
3. 1920 to 1960 & population center
4. The growth of suburbs
5. The rise of suburbia
6. Major social and economic trends of the post World War II era
7. The suburban lifestyle problems
8. The baby boom
9. William Levitt & the mass production of houses
10. American “consensus”
11. Church membership in the 1950s
12. Religion in the 1950s
13. Stereotype of women in the 1950s
14. Popular houses of suburbia
15. Alfred Kinsey’s research
16. Modern Republicanism
17. Sustained economic growth of the 1950s
18. President Eisenhower & “a row of dominoes”
19. Corporate diversification and conglomeration
20 Domestic policy style of the Eisenhower era
21. The Cold War in the 1950s
22. The foreign policies of the Eisenhower era
23. The “new look” in Cold War policy & Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles
24. The French Vietnamese war & help from the United States
25. The Eisenhower 1955 Geneva Summit policy offer of open skies
26. In 1961 President Eisenhower & the dangers of the “military industrial complex
27. Conscious dissent & the consensus oriented, organizational culture of the
28. The consensus oriented, organizational culture & Marilyn Monroe
29. Kennedy’s victory in 1966
30. The Kennedy’s foreign policy in Latin America
COMPLETION -
The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed in response to [ ] authorized federal funding of science and foreign language programs in public schools.
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The National Defense Highway Act created today’s system of [ ] highways.
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Crucial to the increased reliance on the automobile was the creation of this highway system, paid for by taxes on [ )].
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Consistent with suburbia’s leisure minded lifestyle was a new household technology that burgeoned in the 1950s: [ ].
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[ ] was one of the places where the CIA orchestrated covert operations that toppled the government.
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When [ ] asked the United States to intervene against the Viet Minh in 1954 in Indochina, President Eisenhower refused the request.
IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS
Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals, and places, and explain their significance:
Terms and Concepts
Interstate Highway Act
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civil religion
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organization man
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conglomerate
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modern Republicanism
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mass automobility
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New Look
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brinksmanship
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covert operations
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Open Skies
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Eisenhower Doctrine
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U-2
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Sputnik
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Sunbelt phenomenon
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beatniks
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abstract expressionism
| Individuals and Places
St. Lawrence Seaway
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Billy Graham
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William Whyte
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John Foster Dulles
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Jacobo Arbenz Guzman
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Nikita Khrushchev
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Beirut, Lebanon
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Gary Powers
| MAP IDENTIFICATIONS
Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map on the following page, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.
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Quemoy
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Dien Bien Phu
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South Vietnam
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Taiwan
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Hanoi
 Critical Thinking EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS) -
Locate Quemoy and Matsu on the map, “Asian Trouble Spots” (page 960). Why would they be a point of contention between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese governments?
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Looking again at the Asian map, explain Eisenhower’s domino theory about Vietnam. What information other than geographic data would you need to evaluate whether or not the theory was valid?
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Looking again at the map on page 960, what countries, if any, would you say were vital to American security? What makes them vital?
EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS AND CHARTS) -
In the painting Easter Morning (page 943), how many details of “ideal” suburban life are shown? What aspect of 1950s culture is Norman Rockwell satirizing?
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What underlying message does the photograph of a demonstration fallout shelter (page 964) give about the notion of surviving a nuclear war? In what ways does it convey that message?
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In the graph, “Average Annual Regional Migration” (page 947), what trends are shown to continue after the war? How does that continuation contribute to an explanation of the “Sunbelt phenomenon?” To the rise of the civil rights movement?
Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer the questions that follow.
The increased willingness to see sexual pleasure as an integral part of marriage received additional attention in 1948, with the publication of an apparently dry scientific study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Its author, Professor Alfred Kinsey, hardly expected the storm of publicity received by that study or its companion, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Kinsey began his research career as a zoologist with a zest for classifying data. During the 1940s he had turned to collecting information on sexual behavior. Based on more than 10,000 interviews, Kinsey reached conclusions that were startling for his day. Masturbation and premarital petting, he reported, were widespread. Women did not just endure sex as a wifely duty; they enjoyed it in much the same way as men did. Socioeconomic factors of race, class, ethnicity, and age often dictated sexual preferences. Extramarital sex was common for both husbands and wives. About 10 percent of the population were homosexual.
It is difficult in more sexually liberated times to appreciate the impact of Kinsey’s work and the controversy surrounding it. Commentators called his first volume “the most talked about book of the twentieth century.” Social scientists, with some justice, objected that Kinsey’s sample was too limited. (Most of his subjects were Midwestern, middle class, and well educated.) Later studies challenged some of his figures (for example, the percentage of homosexuals in the population). More strident critics of the day charged that Kinsey was a “menace to society” who would destroy the morals of the nation. Kinsey replied that he had published a “report on what people do which raises no questions about what they should do.” Polls indicated that most Americans felt comfortable about having such research published, perhaps partly because they found liberation in the discovery that behaviors once treated as sinful or perverse were widely practiced.
PRIMARY SOURCE: Betty Friedan Attacks the Feminine Mystique*
In 1963, Betty Friedan jolted the myth of the contented suburban housewife when she published The Feminine Mystique. Friedan tried to explain how the image of independent career women, popular in the 1930s, had become trivialized into a cult of domesticity and submissiveness. She further wanted to urge women to expand their horizons and develop a stronger sense of personal identity.
By the end of 1949, only one out of three heroines in the women’s magazines was a career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering that what she really wanted was to be a housewife. In 1958 and again in 1959, I went through issue after issue of the three major women’s magazines ...without finding a single heroine who had a career, a commitment to any work, art, profession, or mission in the world, other than “Occupation: housewife.” Only one in a hundred heroines had a job; even the young unmarried heroines no longer worked except at snaring a husband.
These new happy housewife heroines seemed strangely younger than the spirited career girls of the thirties and forties. They seem to get younger all the time—in looks, and a childlike dependence. They have no vision of the future, except to have a baby. The only active growing figure in their world is the child. The housewife heroines are forever young, because their own image ends in childbirth. Like Peter Pan, they must remain young, while their children grow up in the world. They must keep on having babies because the feminine mystique says there is no other way for a woman to be a heroine. Here is a typical specimen from a story called “The Sandwich Maker” (Ladies’ Home Journal, April, 1959). She took home economics in college, learned how to cook, never held a job, and still plays the child bride, though she now has three children of her own. Her problem is money. “Oh nothing boring, like taxes or reciprocal trade agreements, or foreign aid programs. I leave all that economic jazz to my constitutionally elected representative in Washington, heaven help him.”
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