Click on this image to see a 10 minute instructional film on the “idyllic” 1950s.
The atomic bomb, the Cold War, fallout shelters, the Red Scare, the Army-McCarthy hearings, the HUAC — we don’t remember any of the bad stuff about the past. We only remember what we want to remember, or what we’re told to remember, as in the film above.
Here’s a link to an excellent article, The Other American Kitchen: Alternative Domesticity in 1950s Design, Politics, and Fiction by Caroline Hellman, about the ways in which these images of domesticity and comfort are created, and then propagated as a historical record, when in fact, what marked the 1950s more than anything else was conformity. History is nothing more than the version of events that the dominant culture wants us to remember; never forget that. The truth – whatever that might be, and however we might discover it - is buried in the archives.
Tags: 1950s, America, Instructional Films, Pre-Digital Culture
