Summary
History Channel series
The fifties are the subject of a History Channel recent seven-part documentary by David Halberstam. Halberstam, who is prominent in a narrative role, comes off like a prosecuting attorney. Moralizing is incessant. There is not much sympathy and not much understanding of the decade's sensibility. The central theme seems to be the pervasive and entirely undesirable effects of advertising on the culture of the decade. Only victims and dissenters are treated favorably. The producers are not really radical critics, only snobs and lacking in comprehension of the decade. The segment on race is easily the best one, with great visuals, though weak on context.See the full content of this document
Extract
The fifties as I never knew them.
The first duty of the historian, I used to tell my students, is to understand the past on its own terms. It should be obvious that good history requires an empathetic imagination: the ability to get inside the minds of those of other times and other places and see the world as they saw it. One may or may not, in the end, have sympathy for that other world. To understand a point of view is not necessarily to agree with it. But ...
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