Index# 03725
Will Count Towards SAS – History Major
Will Count Towards SAS – History Minor
This course examines the intersection between the cold war, international diplomacy, domestic politics and cultural change in America during the postwar period. Topics will include McCarthyism, conformity and rebellion, youth culture, the civil rights movement, the rise of television and the transformation of the American family. The course is designed to be truly interdisciplinary. On McCarthyism we will read political speeches, FBI files and personal memoirs. On the “family mystique” –and the rebellion from it—we will watch episodes of “Ozzie and Harriet,” read secondary material on the rise of television, and examine advertisements. Also included under the rubric of the family is the rise of Playboy Magazine, and we will look at how the magazine packaged heterosexual masculinity in conflict with domesticity and in concert with male consumerism (excluding centerfolds). On media we will read Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride. The class will listen to early rock n’ roll and read Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train: The Rise of Rock n’ Roll. We will spend a class on Robert Frank’s classic book of photographs The Americans and contrast Frank’s photographs with the epoch’s representation of itself on TV and in advertisements. On civil rights we will read Melba Patillo Beal’s book on the desegregation of Little Rock, Warriors Don’t Cry, and on anti-intellectualism Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Other readings will include chapters from Kerouac’s On the Road, sociological works like The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man and articles about juvenile delinquency.
About Professor Devlin
Rachel Devlin is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University specializing in the cultural politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the postwar United States. She is the author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (2005). In her most recent book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools (2018), she draws on interviews and archival research to tell the stories of the many young women who stood up to enraged protestors, hostile teachers, and hateful white students every day while integrating classrooms. Among them were Lucile Bluford, who fought to desegregate the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism before World War II, and Marguerite Carr and Doris Faye Jennings, who as teenagers became the public faces of desegregation years before Brown v. Board of Education. Devlin has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.