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The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons. Ed. by Joel Foreman. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. vi, 346 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02271-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-252-06574-3.)
In this anthology, editor Joel Foreman has compiled an intriguing collection of twelve essays that focus on various facets of American popular culture of the 1950s. While this era in American history has been persistently characterized (especially in the popular press) as a period of political and social consensus and cultural conformity, the essays in this volume seek to interrogate and destabilize that assumption and, in the process, to reveal a culture of complexity and contradiction. It is this disruptive and turbulent dimension that serves as the referent in the title of this book.
Despite the...