Post-WWII Conditions:

1) Affluence: A True Middle Class Society

-- Internal Migration

-- Gains in Freedom and Rights

-- Education

2) The Holocaust

3) The Challenge of Reconstructing the World

-- Liberal Humanism

-- Economic Interests

-- Power Vacuum

4) Soviet Union

5) The Bomb

Results: Dramatic Change

-- America in the Forties: Segregation, Sexism, and Social Conservatism

ð Segregation

ð Sexism

ð Social Conservatism

--Changes:

1) Race Relations

 

-- Legal Changes

-- Class more than Race

 

2) Gender Relations and Roles

 

-- Postwar Layoffs & Return to the Home

• Baby Boom

-- Social Conformity of the Fifties

-- Expansion of the Work Force

-- Employment: Middle-Class Aspirations Not Necessity

ð Service Industry

 

3) Sexual Attitudes and Behavior--

-- The Collapse in Morality

-- The Roaring Twenties?

-- The Kinsey Report

-- The Decline of Taboo

-- Homosexuality

-- Mainline Religions

4) American Business

-- 1945-1970

ð Improved Relations with Public and Government

ð Decentralization and Diversification

 

-- 1970-1995: Crisis

ð Managerial Failure:

ð Deconglomeration and Downsizing

 

-- 1995--: A New American Era?

 

5) America's International Role

-- A Compound Revolution

-- 1960s Decline

1) Military Exports

2) Economic Decline

-- End of the Cold War

 

6) Role of the Military in American Life

 

7) Personal Privacy

 

8) Nationalization (even globalization) of American Life