A Year That Changed America
Every decade, it seems, contains a single year that epitomizes its era. During the Great Depression, it was 1933, a period marked by bank failures, unemployment lines, and the Dust Bowl. In the 1960s, the iconic year was 1968: the Tet offensive, protests in Chicago, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. u And so it is that a single year can describe another momentous time in American history, a decade that in some ways was as revolutionary as the turbulent one that followed. u In the 1950s, Americans had never been happier. They had steady paychecks, intact families, and, more and more often, two cars in a new garage. Yet looming over all was the threat of global nuclear war. The Soviets' launch of Sputnik caught the country off guard, setting off the space race. Growing racial tensions hit their ugly peak in Little Rock, Ark., and the stirrings of a different kind of rebellion accompanied the limited introduction of the birth control pill. u Modernity was creeping in: Jack Kerouac created a sensation with On the Road, the behemoth Edsel was born (and later died), and a former adman named Dr. Seuss revolutionized the way kids learned to read. u Remarkably, it all happened in 1957. Half a century later, U.S. News takes a look back at this seminal year. It's a year that, for better or worse, planted the roots for a new America.
This story appears in the August 13, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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