Fall Conference 2008: The 1950s & 1960s

The NEHTA fall conference in October 2008 is on the 1950s and 1960s. This one day conference will feature a keynote address by Paul Lauter of Trinity College (CT) and be followed by four sessions run by college professors and secondary school teachers. The focus will be on the culture, politics, and literature of the 1950s and 1950s — from the Cold War to Kerouac, from Vietnam to Woodstock. For information on the conference, see: www.nehta.net.

How do you teach students to think historically about the 1950s and 1960s?

To begin the discussion, I turn to the political and cultural “first” New Left to mark a shift from the 1950s to the 1960s–to historicize the shift in context.  E. P. Thompson, the British historian, and others had formed the “New Left Review” in the wake of the events of 1956, beginning a kind of “socialist humanism”. With the Port Huron Statement, written in 1962 in Michigan, Tom Hayden and others renewed the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and renewed the explicit politicization of the academy — beginning with students. Publications and organizations (such as the “New Left Review” and SDS) were at the vanguard of a pivotal change. However, it was the ongoing civil rights movement that had already championed a new vision of society. The 1960s (perhaps 1963-1975 figured as the era of the “1960s” while the “1950s” could be construed to mean 1948-1963) would reshape the field of professional history perhaps more dramatically than any other. Radicalized students used the past to counter the 1950s military-industrial complex, then turned to graduate school — shaping a New Social history, as well as New Labor history and resurgence of community studies. These are the historians who trained most of us and are beginning to retire.  As we teach students to think about the 1950s and 1960s from an historical point of view, how do our own perspectives on history influence the way we teach?  How, in short, has history been re-figured by these historians?

For introductory material on the 1950s and 1960s, here are a number of online podcasts on the 1950s, 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War given by Jerald Podair at Lawrence University (see lectures 10-15):  http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/history/podcasts.shtml