Friday, November 13, 2009

Outline of major happenings of the 50s and 60s

1950s (The Fabulous Fifties) History & Important Points

  • The end of WWII brought thousands of young servicemen back home to America to pick up their lives and start new families in new homes with new jobs.
  • American industry expanded to meet peacetime needs.
  • Americans began buying goods not available during the war, which created corporate expansion and jobs.
  • Growth everywhere, in every sense.
  • 1954 - Racial segregation is ruled unconstitutional in public schools by the U.S. Supreme Court
  • A fresh artistic outlook after WWII was prominent. Abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Franz Kline received official recognition at the NY MOMA. These artists worked mostly experimentally. Mark Rothko also was on the rise, as well as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who worked abstractly. African American artists such as John T. Biggers, Romare Bearden, and Henry Clay Anderson presented a different view of American life.
  • Part of the 1950s boom in consumerism included housing, people could afford single-family dwellings and suburbia was born.
  • America had just begun its recovery from World War II when the Korean Conflict developed. The USSR became a major enemy in the Cold War. Americans were feeling a sense of national anxiety. (Was America the greatest country in the world? Was life in America the best it had ever been?) As the decade passed, literature reflected the conflict of self-satisfaction with '50s Happy Days and cultural self-doubt about conformity and the true worth of American values.
  • Until 1954, an official policy of “separate but equal” educational opportunities for blacks had been determined to be the correct method to insure that all children in America received an adequate and equal education in the public schools of the nation. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other members of the Supreme Court wrote in Brown vs. the Board f Education of Topeka, Kansas that separate facilities for blacks did not make those facilities equal according to the Constitution. Integration was begun across the nation.
  • Another crisis in education was uncovered by critic Rudolph Flesch in his book Why Johnny Can’t Read, who claimed that the American educational system was not doing its job.

Children's Book Award winners of the fifties:

Newbery Award Winners

1950 - The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli
1951 - Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates
1952 - Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes
1953 - Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark
1954 - ...And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold
1955 - The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong
1956 - Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
1957 - Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson
1958 - Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith
1959 - The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare


Caldecott Award Winners
1950: Song of the Swallows by Leo Politi
1951: The Egg Tree by Katherine Milhous
1952: Finders Keepers, illustrated by Nicolas, pseud. (Nicholas Mordvinoff); text: Will, pseud. (William Lipkind)
1953: The Biggest Bear by Lynd Ward
1954: Madeline's Rescue by Ludwig Bemelmans
1955: Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper. ill. by Marcia Brown; text: translated from Charles Perrault by Marcia Brown
1956: Frog Went A-Courtin', illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky; text: retold by John Langstaff)
1957: A Tree Is Nice, illustrated by Marc Simont; text: Janice Udry
1958: Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey
1959: Chanticleer and the Fox, illustrated by Barbara Cooney; text: adapted from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by Barbara Cooney



1960s (The Swingin’ Sixties) History & Important Points

As Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner mentions:

"If you can remember anything about the sixties, then you weren't really there."

  • The sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults.
  • The 1960s have become synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, and subversive events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and beyond.
  • In Africa the 1960s was a period of radical political change as 32 countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers.
  • The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life.
  • Young people wanted change when it came to education, values, lifestyles, laws, and entertainment. Many of the revolutionary ideas, which began in the sixties, are continuing to evolve today.
  • Just like in the 50s, art in America of the 60s was influenced by the desire to move into the modern age or future, which the space age seemed to forecast. Major works by Alexander Calder (mobiles and sculpture) or Helen Frankenthaler showed a desire to escape from details to interpretation. Artists now wanted to inspire viewers to leap into the unknown and experience art in their own individual way. Andy Warhol also appeared in the 60s. Other popular forms of art in this decade included assemblage, op art, kinetic abstraction, environmental art, and pop art.
  • Literature also reflected what was happening in the political arenas and social issues of America in the sixties.
  • A book which described some of the turmoil of race relations as they affected people in America, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a small southern town and social distinctions between races. Writing about race and gender, women of color like Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou and Margaret Walker Alexander created new insights on feminism as it developed in America.
  • The Rise of Feminism
  • Sylvia Plath and Mary McCarthy spoke of women in roles outside those of the happy wife and mother of the fifties. Women like Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem, led the way for many women.
  • Disillusionment with the system was the theme of books like Catch 22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
  • People became more concerned with their health and their environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened the environmental movement and the Sierra Club gained a following. Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at any Speed, led to the consumer movement.
  • Anti-war movement – The conflict in Vietnam would eventually lead to a commitment of over half a million American troops, resulting in over 55,000 American deaths and producing a large-scale antiwar movement in the United States. As late as the end of 1965, few Americans protested the American involvement in Vietnam, but as the war dragged on and the body count continued to climb, civil unrest escalated. Students became a powerful and disruptive force and university campuses sparked a national debate over the war. As the movement's ideals spread beyond college campuses, doubts about the war also began to appear within the administration itself. A mass movement began rising in opposition to the Vietnam War, ending in the massive Moratorium protests in 1969, as well as the movement of resistance to conscription ("the Draft") for the war
  • In 1963 Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are. This controversial book with its illustrations won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and has become a classic in children’s literature.
  • 1963: Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech in Washington DC on August 28.
  • 1963: President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22.
  • 1964: Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This landmark piece of legislation in the United States outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment.
  • 1965: The surgeon general determined that smoking was a health hazard, and in 1965 required cigarette manufacturers to place warnings on all packages and in all ads.
  • 1965: The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21.
  • 1967: The birth control pill became widely available and abortion for cause was legalized in Colorado.
  • 1967: Both abortion and artificial insemination became legal in some states.
  • 1967: The first clone of a vertebrate, a South African tree frog, was produced in 1967. Dr. Denton Cooley implanted the first artificial heart in a human, and it kept the patient alive for three days until a human heart could be transplanted.
  • 1968: The assignations of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, and Robert Kennedy on June 5.
  • 1969: The hippie movement endorsed drugs, rock music, mystic religions and sexual freedom. They opposed violence. The Woodstock Festival, at which 400,000 young people gathered in a spirit of love and sharing, represents the pinnacle of the hippie movement.
  • 1969: Apollo 11 – the first human spaceflight to land on the Moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr. fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he had expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

Children’s Book Award Winners of the 1960s

Newbery Award Winners of the 60s

1960: Onion John by Joseph Krumgold

1961: Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

1962: The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare

1963: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Wojciechowska

1964: It's Like This, Cat by Emily Neville

1965: Shadow of a Bull by Maia

1966: I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino

1967: Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt

1968: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

1969: The High King by Lloyd Alexander

Caldecott Award Winners of the 60s

1960: Nine Days to Christmas, illustrated by Marie Hall Ets; text: Marie Hall Ets and Aurora Labastida

1961: Baboushka and the Three Kings, illustrated by Nicolas Sidjakov; text: Ruth Robbins

1962: Once a Mouse, retold and illustrated by Marcia Brown

1963: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

1964: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

1965: May I Bring a Friend? Illustrated by Beni Montresor; text: Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

1966: Always Room for One More, ill. by Nonny Hogrogian; text: Sorche Nic Leodhas, pseud. [Leclair Alger]

1967: Sam, Bangs & Moonshine by Evaline Ness

1968: Drummer Hoff, illustrated by Ed Emberley; text: adapted by Barbara Emberley

1969: The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, illustrated by Uri Shulevitz; text: retold by Arthur Ransome

No comments:

Post a Comment