During the period 1945 - 1960, the United States developed an intense fervor of anticommunism and strove to prevent the spread of communism to other nations, particularly the Indochina region. As a result, the government ignored or responded inadequately to key social events at home affecting both women and African Americans. This thesis will explore the extent of the active involvement in Indochina to prevent the spread of communism and the effects of that involvement on major social issues at home concerning African Americans and women. The United States had numerous opportunities to discontinue its involvement in Indochina, but it repeatedly chose to remain an important participant in the events that took place in that country from 1945-1960. As our involvement intensified, less attention was given to discrimination, educational, workforce, and civil rights issues that concerned African Americans and women. A slight period of peace allowed these groups to petition the government for help, but the response was often inadequate. As a result, these two groups formed social and political committees that would later become a major factor in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. The research for this thesis included both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources include documents from the Eisenhower Public Library (accessed online), the Truman Public Library (accessed online), and personal accounts from those involved in the government and social actions at this time. The majority of the material was available from the Sherrod Library at East Tennessee State University. The conclusions drawn from this research are: a) the United States government demonstrated the precedence of fighting communism over domestic issues both by the choice to remain an active participant in Indochina and by the extent of involvement; b) African American issues were often ignored unless some type of public demonstration forced the government to take notice and act; c) the anticommunist movement caused the government to overlook issues facing women to the point that the outrage generated by the ambivalence led women to revolt from traditional stereotypes to gain equal rights.

In 1952, affluent white suburban citizens of Birmingham, Alabama voted overwhelmingly in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This thesis explores and examines why the emergence of a thriving suburban community that voted Republican occurred. This examination used a collection of numerous sources, primary and secondary. Newspapers served as the most important tool for discovering why the new suburbs aligned to Republicanism. The sources describe a suburban area that aligned with the Republican Party due to numerous reasons: race, Eisenhower’s popularity, the Cold War, and economic issues. Due to those reasons, the election of 1952 began to alter their society and political affiliations. The 1952 presidential election results symbolized the political, cultural, and economic acceptance of the Republican Party, which created a Republican political base in the heart of a Democratic state.

Aaron Kohn’s career as a driven professional crime fighter with the Special Citizens Investigative Committee, and later the Metropolitan Crime Commission, began after the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime, one of the first Senate investigative committee hearings broadcast on the evolving medium of television, gripped the American public in 1950. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s committee visited cities across America, including New Orleans. The hearings’ popularity revealed public thirst for coverage of sensational topics like organized crime, and established how Kohn would soon approach the SCIC job: with force and bombast, featuring flair and sometimes bended truth. Aaron Kohn combined Kefauver’s crusading spirit and media savvy and attempted to apply it to his own long career as a citizen crime fighter in New Orleans, but he met limited success taking on a corrupt establishment in a career that could ultimately be deemed a failure.

Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / The 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a dawning awareness throughout many sectors of American society that women were good for more than simply bearing children and tending house. The threat of communism, epitomized by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, created extreme anxiety in the United States, an anxiety that manifested itself in two contradictory fashions. First, American women learned that the nation's best defense against communism began in the home, which was decidedly women's domain. The second message that American women received during this time is unquestionably the lesser known. The federal government and much of American society identified women as an untapped resource in national defense, a source of innovation and advancement in science and technology, thereby implying that with the help of American women, the United States could match Soviet achievements in these fields. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

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During the 1950s, Venezuela embarked in an architectural venture marked by aesthetic, programmatic, and technological explorations. Politically framed by the international tension of the Cold War, this period was distinguished by multiple commercial exchanges between Venezuela and the United States, specially based on the oil industry. Many cultural aspects of the Venezuelan life, including its urban and architectural production, changed because of this interrelationship. Yet the conventional view is that architecture in Venezuela was torn between the repetition of U.S. models and the purest creativity of its local designers. Based on periodical publications of that time, and methodologically framed by the contemporary notion of transculturation and Gianni Vattimo’s weak though, this research demonstrates that modern architecture in Venezuela, produced by both locals and Americans, went beyond a unilateral center-periphery influence, and ended up being the hyperrealization (intensified version) of U.S. ideals. In this sense, the research analyzes an aspect not studied yet in depth: the connection between the long-term geographical profile of Venezuela and a unique geopolitical situation, as the basis for an outstanding architecture. The dissertation examines how the Edificio Creole in Caracas, designed by American architect Lathrop Douglass for Standard Oil, and completed in 1955, was not the subsequent version but the advanced prototype of the Esso office buildings both in Louisiana and New Jersey. It shows as well how the Electricity Building in Caracas (1955), also designed by Douglass, and whose authorship has remained unknown until now, represented a unique opportunity both to explore the insertion of an “horizontal skyscraper” in downtown, and to reveal a complex network of professional and political relations. By examining Higuerote Beach Resort, a vacation and residential complex located near Caracas, the dissertation also demonstrates how American magazines were used by Venezuelans as the basis for an architecture that became original without the inspiration of a genius designer. Finally, this research analyzes the production of a supernatural architecture through the Helicoid Shopping Center in Caracas (designed by Arquitectura y Urbanismo C.A. in 1955), one of the most paradigmatic examples of modern Venezuelan creativity, and probably the utmost realization of the American Utopia. / text

A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre's relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post-industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production.

Long overshadowed by the subsequent 1960s ‘Boom’, Cuban novels of the 1950s have been confined to the backwater of literary analysis, often grouped together and dismissed as mere social realism like their Spanish counterparts, or described as inferior. The spatial has been similarly overlooked in literary analysis in favour of a focus on stylistic experimentation, narrative structure, characterisation and the temporal. More recently, however, theorists such as Mitchell (1980) and (1989), and Wegner (2002), have argued that literature has become increasingly spatial, and that a greater focus on spatial analysis is needed. Furthermore, conceptions of space in literature have moved from the static notion of ‘setting’ and identification within a specific location and time, to embrace the function of actual physical spaces, whether exterior or interior, public or private, embedded or liminal, juxtaposed, dynamic, static or fluid. One Cuban novel of the 1950s has already been discussed from a spatial perspective - El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier. Using the two previous studies on spatiality in this novel as a starting point (Stanton [1993] and Vásquez [1996]), this analysis expands on the conclusions made by these studies, stressing the importance of water imagery, and demonstrating that spaces in El acoso are essentially dynamic and female-gendered, arguing that the crisis experienced by the acosado is actually one of masculine identity. Building on the expanded analysis of space in El acoso, three lesser-known Cuban novels of the 1950s are then considered from the perspective of space: Los Valedontes (1953) by Alcides Iznaga, Romelia Vargas (1952) by Surama Ferrer, and La trampa (1956) by Enrique Serpa. The socio-economic, political and cultural backcloth for the novels is set out, before an investigation into theories of space, both literary and non-literary, is conducted. Spaces in Los Valedontes reveal that in the rural domain, sexual identities are stable with conventional masculine hegemony virtually uncontested. Spaces in Romelia Vargas demonstrate that in the urban domain, female sexual identity, albeit historically suppressed, triumphs over the traditionally dominant male norm, whilst a study of spaces in La trampa demonstrates that not only are gangsters, policemen and homosexuals shown to occupy particularly challenged positions, but also that constructions of mainstream Cuban masculinity are under threat. The conclusion compares the function of spaces across all four novels, adding new insights into existing theories of literary space where appropriate. This thesis, therefore, tests the hypothesis that the manipulation of space in these novels constitutes material worthy of study, showing that spaces are dynamic and challenging when female-gendered, and constituting a threat to the hegemony exerted by traditional models of masculinity. Spaces in these novels demonstrate how the early part of the 1950s was a period in which an unpredictable array of contested positions was exposed through cultural, racial, gender and sexual stereotypes, leaving conventional norms of identity open to question.

[From Introduction]: ‘Work’ is not a topic that much concerns contemporary novelists or fires the creative imagination. Today, writing about work is primarily done by investigative reporters like Elizabeth Wynhausen, whose Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005) is a striking – if rare – under-cover exposé of what ‘economic reform’ really means for menial Australian workers. There is certainly no literary equivalent now of the British and Australian novels, appearing in the 1950s and 1960s, preoccupied with the relationship between changing patterns of work and working-class experience: the lived transformations of traditional class and family ties; the impact of new consuming habits and popular cultural pursuits; the political situation of ordinary working people, and shifts in their attitudes and values. These British and Australian novels generally assumed that reorganisations of the working coal face or factory floor extended into the private sphere, informing or producing the stressful personal dramas played out in communities and at the kitchen sink.This thesis argues that these novels were elements of a broader dialogue in the 50s and 60s: one in which work and working-class life were significant subjects, articulated in a range of complementary discourses that were interlocutory – economic and political analysis, sociology, nascent cultural theory, popular newspaper commentary and literature. Consequently, a main objective of this thesis is to reveal how these representational forms or disciplines converged in the period 1950–1965: to examine their common themes and interests, and their collectiveresponses to questions concerning working-class life. The thesis argues that all these forms or disciplines shared the view that the condition of the working classes, in both Britain and Australia, crucially mattered to the overall social architecture of the time. It also argues that they all regarded the presence of America, the era’s pre-eminent global force, as central to such questions; and that America was complexly understood as an idealised political concept, a power-house of popular cultural production, and a very real engine of socio-economic change.

Ce travail analyse les relations de l'ethnographie avec un corpus divers de la littérature mexicaine publiée au cours des années 1950, 1960 et 1970. Ces relations sont examinées par ce que nous appelons «empreinte ethnographique», une frontière sémiotique (dans la terminologie de Yuri Lotman) où les intérêts et les méthodes de l'ethnographie sont traduits en termes littéraires. Grâce à ce concept, nous analysons: Juan Pérez Jolote: biografía de un tzotzil (1948), de Ricardo Pozas; El diosero (1952), de Francisco Rojas González; Benzulul (1959), de Eraclio Zepeda; Balún Canán (1957) et Los convidados de agosto (1964), de Rosario Castellanos; La tumba (1964), de José Agustín; Gazapo (1965), de Gustavo Sainz; Los hongos alucinantes (1964), de Fernando Benítez; Los albañiles (1963), de Vicente Leñero; Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) et La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), d’ Elena Poniatowska; Chin chin el teporocho (1971), d’Armando Ramírez; et Vida de María Sabina. La sabia de los hongos (1977), d’Álvaro Estrada. L'interconnexion est présentée par le travail littéraire axé sur la reconstruction des sujets inscrits et configurés par leur culture: si d'abord dans la littérature mexicaine l'accent était mis sur l'indigène, ultérieurement cette littérature essai d'expliquer la culture de l'habitant urbain. De cette façon, l’empreinte ethnographique dévoile comment un corpus apparemment divers est interconnecté. De même, nous proposons que cette empreinte ethnographique soit construite par ce qu'on appelle le «réalisme culturel»: un style d’écriture qui tente de rendre compte de cultures spécifiques selon le point de vue de ses acteurs. / This study analyzes ethnography’s relationship with a diverse corpus of Mexican literature published during the decades of 1950, 1960 and 1970. These relationships are analyzed through what we call “ethnographic imprint”, a semiotic frontier (in Yuri Lotman’s terminology) where ethnography’s interests and methods are translated into literary terms. Through this concept, we analyze Juan Pérez Jolote: biografía de un tzotzil (1948), by Ricardo Pozas; El diosero (1952), by Francisco Rojas González; Benzulul (1959), by Eraclio Zepeda; Balún Canán (1957) and Los convidados de agosto (1964), by Rosario Castellanos; La tumba (1964), by José Agustín; Gazapo (1965), by Gustavo Sainz; Los hongos alucinantes (1964), by Fernando Benítez; Los albañiles (1963), by Vicente Leñero; Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), by Elena Poniatowska; Chin chin el teporocho (1971), by Armando Ramírez; and Vida de María Sabina. La sabia de los hongos (1977), by Álvaro Estrada. The interconnection appears through literary work focused on rebuilding subjects framed and shaped by their culture: if the original focus was the native, in the later period the subject explained according to its culture was the urban dweller. Thus, the ethnographic imprint reveals how an apparently diverse corpus is interconnected. Similarly, we propose that this ethnographic imprint is constructed through what we call “cultural realism”: a writing style that tries to account specific cultures (with correspondence in the extratextual world) from the actors’ point of view.