Word: 1950s
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...veterans made up almost half the nation's college students. It also offered low-interest, no-money-down mortgages, backed by the U.S. government, that allowed millions of families to purchase their first homes. The move helped spark the postwar baby boom and the suburbanization of America in the 1950s: it effectively created the American middle class...
This is a relatively new phenomenon. The best political satirists of the 1950s and '60s were prickly outsiders, scornful of the high and mighty. When Mort Sahl sat on a nightclub stool and took out his newspaper to deconstruct the day's headlines, or Lenny Bruce lashed out, in X-rated language, at the political and moral hypocrisy he saw around him, they hardly expected, or wanted, the targets of their satire to show up onstage at the hungry i and join in the laughs...
...make one movie franchise a hit and another a flop? That was the question hovering over the first film adaptations of two best-selling fantasy series for children, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Lewis' series of seven books, published in the 1950s, was widely seen as a Christian allegory, presided over by the God-lion Aslan, who dies and rises again. Pullman's trilogy, written in the 1990s, described a battle between a dictatorial deity and the rebel angels determined to defeat him. As the author told the Sydney Morning Herald...
Frank read his adopted nation as very few other photographers had in the mid-1950s. He saw it through the filter of his own somber disposition, to be sure, but with a conviction that the most direct route into the heart of things was by way of what were supposed to be the margins. He liked to be anyplace he could find people who were forlorn, pensive, manic or needy. Exaltation attracted him too. What other word to apply to the mood of that intense man in white praying at the water's edge in Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana...
...Frank put it later, his goal was to make pictures that would constitute "an authentic contemporary document; the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation." Which they did--and then some. The parameters of American photography in the 1950s were largely set by magazines like LIFE and Look. More often than not, their taste ran to shots that were crisp as an apple, easily deciphered, and put a bright spin on things. Frank's were blurred, murky, tilted and mysterious. In Parade--Hoboken, New Jersey, the Stars and Stripes flutter between two bunkered enigmas, an image radically...