An Analysis Of Elaine Tyler May S Homeward Bound

Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its author’s view of the course of modern US history. The aim of May’s study is to trace the links between Cold War politics and the domestic lives of everyday American families at the time. Historians have long noted the unique domestic trends of 1950s America, with its increased focus on the nuclear family, neatly divided traditional gender roles and aspirational, suburban consumer lifestyles. May’s contribution was to analyse the interplay between the domestic scene and the political ideologies of American government, and then to build a carefully-constructed argument that draws attention to the ways in which these seemingly disparate forces are in fact related. May’s key achievement was to use her analytical skills to understand the relationships between these different factors. She traced ways in which domestic life and US foreign policy mirrored one another, showing that the structures and processes they aimed for, while different in scale, were essentially the same. She then carefully brought together different types of historical data, organizing her study to produce a carefully reasoned argument that the American suburban home was in certain direct ways the product of the ‘containment’ policies that ruled American foreign policy at the time.

Family is the foundation of society, and debates on family norms have always touched the very heart of America. This volume investigates the negotiations and transformations of family values and gender norms in the twentieth century as they relate to the overarching processes of social change of that period. By combining long-term approaches with innovative analysis, Inventing the "Modern American Family" transcends not only the classical dichotomies between women's studies and masculinity studies, but also contribute substantially to the history of gender and culture in the United States.

Library has Vol. 1-5.

Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its author’s view of the course of modern US history. The aim of May’s study is to trace the links between Cold War politics and the domestic lives of everyday American families at the time. Historians have long noted the unique domestic trends of 1950s America, with its increased focus on the nuclear family, neatly divided traditional gender roles and aspirational, suburban consumer lifestyles. May’s contribution was to analyse the interplay between the domestic scene and the political ideologies of American government, and then to build a carefully-constructed argument that draws attention to the ways in which these seemingly disparate forces are in fact related. May’s key achievement was to use her analytical skills to understand the relationships between these different factors. She the traced ways in which domestic life and US foreign policy mirrored one another, showing that the structures and processes they aimed for, while different in scale, were essentially the same. She then carefully brought together different types of historical data, organizing her study to produce a carefully reasoned argument that the American suburban home was in certain direct ways the product of the ‘containment’ policies that ruled American foreign policy at the time.

A collection of articles and essays reflecting the varied professional interests of diplomatic historian Lawrence Kaplan. Drawn largely from Kaplan's former students - now scholars in their own right - there are also contributions from senior colleagues.

In The Edge of Modernism, Walter Kalaidjian explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian creates an original historical account of how American poets became witnesses, often unconsciously, to modern extremity. Combining psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this intense, sweeping account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history. Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets—among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht—Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics. In this way, The Edge of Modernism advances an innovative and dynamic model of modern periodization.

“In the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” wrote Newt Gingrich, “there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American.” Gingrich’s words underline what Mary Caputi sees as a desire of the neoconservative movement to set a foundation for modern America that ennobles the past. Analyzing these competing uses of the past, A Kinder, Gentler America reveals how longing for the era of “the greatest generation” actually exposes a disillusionment with the present. Caputi draws on the theoretical frameworks of Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin to look at how the decade has been portrayed in movies such as Pleasantville and Far from Heaven and delves further to investigate our disenchantment’s lost origins in early modernity through a reading of the poetry of Baudelaire. What emerges is a stark contrast between the depictions of a melancholic present and a cheerful, shiny past. In the right’s invocation of the mythical 1950s and the left’s criticism of the same, Caputi recognizes a common unfulfilled desire, and proposes that by understanding this loss both sides can begin to accept that American identity, despite chaos and confusion, lies in the here and now. Mary Caputi is professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and is author of Voluptuous Yearnings: A Feminist Theory of the Obscene.

This book explores how women within the male-dominated Communist Party in the United States built a home for feminist ideology and practice during the early Cold War. It explores how, in articles and petitions, women carefully crafted voices that spoke to the party’s concerns while challenging its theoretical and practical limitations..