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INTRODUCTION Some people consider the 1950s to be a time when nothing much happened. Their perception of the decade is that of an unexciting era captured in crude black-and-white TV images and best personi- fied by America’s low-key president, Dwight Eisenhower. However, a closer look reveals that momentous events happened in the 1950s, from the baby boom to the H-bomb, from beatniks to Sputnik, from Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe, from civil rights in Little Rock to civil war in Vietnam, from The Catcher in the Rye to “Rock around the Clock,” from Princess Grace to Peyton Place. The 1950s was a decade that began with debates over whether the country really needed an interstate highway system. By the decade’s end, America had set its sights on the Moon with the announcement of the nation’s first astronauts in 1959. The roots of the social and technological revolution that exploded in the 1960s and decades beyond can be found in the cascade of change in the 1950s. FRIENDS AND FOES Falling chronologically at the exact middle of the 20th century, the 1950s managed to look backward to the past as well as forward