Daniel J. Clark is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public Humanities at Oakland University. This interview is based on his new book, Listening to Workers: Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s (University of […]
1950s
Republicans love the 1950s
When Donald Trump says we need to ‘make America great again,” most Republicans think about the 1950s. According to Andrew Van Dam at The Washington Post, Republicans believe that the 1950s was the happiest, safest, most communitarian, and moral society […]
A case for 1950s nostalgia
Today’s socialists are not longing for the days of Jim Crow. But, as Dustin Guastella of Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia argues, neither should they throw out the idea that the 1950s was a great time for the American worker. […]
What happened when a black rabbit and a white rabbit got married?
Here is historian Cynthia Greenlee at The New York Times: In May 1959, the former Alabama schoolteacher Dora Haynes Parker mused about the sexual habits and matrimonial customs of rabbits in a letter to her hometown newspaper, The Montgomery Advertiser. […]
John McWhorter just took me down memory lane
Thanks to McWhorter‘s recent piece at The New York Times, I spent way too much time this morning watching old Looney Tunes clips. Here is a taste: During these times so utterly glum, I’m in a mood to share a […]
1950 census data is about to be released
On Friday (tomorrow) to be exact. Here is Michael Ruane at The Washington Post: On April 1, 1950, an army of 140,000 census enumerators, equipped with fountain pens and government forms, started fanning out across the country to paint a […]
When conservatives loved Francisco Franco
Today it is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. In the 1950s it was the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Here is Joshua Tait at The Bulwark: Prominent conservatives have discovered Hungary and its “twenty-first century dictator,” Viktor Orbán. This week, Tucker Carlson will […]
Who was Margaret Chase Smith?
Several commentators are comparing Liz Cheney’s speech tonight to Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith‘s 1950 speech, “A Declaration of Conscience.” Both were anti-McCarthy (Andrew for Cheney and Joseph for Smith) speeches. No historical analogy is perfect, but this one is […]
What is conservatism?
As historian Joshua Tait reminds us, the meaning of the term “conservatism” has been a contested one in the United States. In his recent piece at The Bulwark he compares a circle of writers in the 1940s and early 1950s […]