Lesson on Thursday, April 19, 2018

Aim: Why did consumer culture become such a fixture of American life in the postwar decades, and how did it affect politics and society?

Bell Ringer: U.S. Post WWII Boom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmka2mydsD0 (13 min)

Agenda: 

1. Levittown


2. America Compared as a class (10 min)

3.

4. Journal 152 - How did the national government encourage suburbanization? 

A: The federal government - through the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration - made the home mortgage market serve a broader range of Americans than ever before after WWII. The FHA  insured thirty-year mortgages with as little as 5 percent down and interest at 2 or 3 percent. The federal government also sponsored massive highway improvements through the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, led to massive suburbanization in the 1960s.  
5. Journal 153 - In what sense was the U.S. becoming, in the language of the Kerner Commission report, "two societies"? 

A: Two societies emerged from postwar American life: A suburban, affluent, white population that fled the cities, and an urban, increasingly black and Latino population that suffered from escalating poverty and urban blight. The rapid expansion of the American middle class left behind a size-able and struggling working-class and poor population, many of them immigrants and people of color, who struggled to survive in the era of postwar prosperity. The "Other America" remained largely invisible as new highway construction and redlining led to de facto segregation and the turning of what were once culturally rich urban ethnic neighborhoods into depressed areas of urban crisis that today we call the inner city. Housing and job discrimination escalated over time for immigrants, particularly for new waves of Latin Americans who came to the U.S. seeking prosperity after WWII. 

6. Let's read the last to paragraphs of Chapter 26 re: Puerto Rico, DR, Cuba, and Miami.

Terms to know: World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), military-industrial complex, Sputnik, The Affluent Society, Veterans Administration (VA), collective bargaining, teenager, baby boom, Shelley v. Kraemer, National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Sunbelt, William J. Levitt, Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

5. Chapter 26 Vocabulary Quiz (oral quiz) (rest of class) 

6. Thinking Like a Historian 26


Home Learning: 

1. Read pages 868 - 879 (including America Compared Qs 3)

2. Journal 154 - How did the growth of the black middle class assist the civil rights movement? 

3. Journal 155 - Why did WWII play such a critical role in the civil rights movement? 

4. Journal 156 - How did the Cold War work in the favor of civil rights? How did it work against the movement? 

TEACHER'S PLANNING DAY (AP TESTING DRILLS)