Question

1- What were the two key characteristics that defined American culture during the 1950s?

2- List two results of the Sputnik crisis in the United States.?

Answer 1

1. In general, the Fifties are viewed as a prosperous time of American history. The United States was ready for this era of relative peace, after the economic difficulties of the Great Depression in the Thirties and the struggles of World War II in the Forties. Hindsight, however, gives us a more insightful view of what had happened in the Fifties. Several advances in the fields of civil rights, literature and music signaled the momentous changes that were occurring in just a few years as America entered the Sixties, perhaps the most turbulent of all American decades.

The birth of rock and roll musically shaped culture more than just what people heard on the radio. The popularity of Elvis Presley in mixing black and white music may have caused outrage among white institutions, but it also ultimately contributed to an increased inclusion of black culture in American everyday life. The Fifties had seen the birth of a musical collective called the Beat Generation of literature.

The tabuses against frank sexuality debates have been regarded as inappropriate and probably detrimental to the psyche. In the world of literature and art, the Beats stood against the tidy, almost antiseptic formalism of the Modernists of the early twentieth century. While the "beats" did not revolutionize literature the way music was done by rock and roll, they have paved the way for a more socially rational literary tradition to move forward.

2. Around the time of the "crisis" in Sputnik, the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Air Force and a few highly chosen and respected defense contractors developed a spy satellite that was so hidden that only a few hundred people knew about it. Only its acronym, CORONA, has long been considered hidden. Instead of thinking about winning the first round of the space race, Eisenhower and his National Security Council were much more interested in launching surveillance satellites that could tell American intelligence where each Soviet missile was located.

There has been a sudden loss of confidence in US technology, ideals, politics, and the military. Science, technology, and engineering in Sputnik's shadow were fully reworked and massively funded. In turn, the Russian satellite forced the US to place a new national emphasis on research science, contributing to the development of microelectronics — the technology used in today's desktop, personal, and portable computers. Many of modern life's key inventions, including the Internet, owe their early development to the rapid speed of Sputnik-led applied science.