Dr. Schwartz in St. Petersburg, Russia, before the battleship that signaled the storming of the
Winter Palace in 1917

Richard A. Schwartz is professor of English and a former fellow in the Honors College. A member of FIU’s faculty since 1979, he teaches twentieth-century American fiction, film studies, Cold War-related culture, and American studies. He also regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses in the Liberal Studies program. Schwartz received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has published extensively on 20th century American society, literature, and film.

In addition to The 1950s, his books include the award-winning Cold War Reference Guide (McFarland, 1997), Cold War Culture (Facts on File, 1998, rpt. 2000), Encyclopedia of the Persian Gulf War (McFarland, 1998), Woody: From Antz to Zelig, an encyclopedic study of Woody Allen's creative work (Greenwood, 2000) and The Films of Ridley Scott (Praeger, 2001). Facts on File will publish The 1990s in 2006 as part of its Eyewitness History Series.

The 1950s chronicles a pivotal period in U.S. history, when Americans radically reshaped domestic social life and adapted to an international order governed by cold war mentalities. This work studies the transformation U.S. society underwent during the decade. As many places in the world struggled to rebound from the devastating effects of World War II, and European colonial empires crumbled, Americans had to come to terms with actual and perceived threats from international and domestic communism, and, following the invention of the hydrogen bomb, with the very real possibility of nuclear apocalypse. At the same time, the civil rights movement gained momentum; Hollywood studios and other institutions blacklisted communists and suspected communist sympathizers; the suburbs blossomed, television emerged as a major cultural force; rock 'n' roll forever transformed popular music; women joined the workforce in previously unheard of numbers. and baby boomers began to exert their market influence as consumer capitalism took root. The 1950s thus presents the forces that shaped life in the United States during this fascinating decade, and it illustrates some of the ways in which Americans handled the rapid transformations of politics, popular culture, economics, and military strategy.

The chapters in this volume in Facts on File’s Eyewitness History series describe each year of the decade with a narrative account of the most significant social, cultural, and political developments. The narrative accounts are then followed by a chronology of events and eyewitness testimonies drawn from newspapers, memoirs of private and public figures, literature, and other sources.

Among the many nationally and internationally known figures whose testimonies are presented are Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, Douglas MacArthur, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Chase Smith, Earl Warren, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rocky Marciano, Billy Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Peggy Guggenheim, James D. Watson (of the Watson and Crick DNA team), Nelson Mandela, and Nikita Khrushchev. The book also includes first-hand recollections from FIU faculty and staff.