The Fifties The Fifties

The Fifties

An Underground History

    • 5.0 • 3 Ratings
    • $13.99

Publisher Description

An “exciting and enlightening revisionist history” (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrates a few solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines.

An “enchanting, beautifully written book about heroes and the dark times to which they refused to surrender” (Todd Gitlin, bestselling author of The Sixties). In a series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals—people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts—who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her “in between” sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination unconstitutional, but that was only one of her gifts to the 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book’s unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring’s Rachel Carson and MIT’s preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives—she is in the living world, he in the theoretical one—converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement.

The Fifties is an “inspiration…[and] a reminder of the hard work and personal sacrifice that went into fighting for the constitutional rights of gay people, Blacks, and women, as well as for environmental protection” (The Washington Post). The book carries the powerful message that change begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of the decentered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.

GENRE
History
RELEASED
2022
February 8
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
288
Pages
PUBLISHER
Simon & Schuster
SELLER
Simon & Schuster Digital Sales LLC
SIZE
10.5
MB
Secret City Secret City
2022
Savage Peace Savage Peace
2007
At the Dark End of the Street At the Dark End of the Street
2010
The Gay Revolution The Gay Revolution
2015
I've Got the Light of Freedom I've Got the Light of Freedom
2007
Into the Bright Sunshine Into the Bright Sunshine
2023
1913 1913
2013
The Field of Blood The Field of Blood
2018
Race Against Time Race Against Time
2020
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
2022
Destiny Disrupted Destiny Disrupted
2009
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
2020