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I found it a little unsettling to see the photo of Churchill, President Roosevelt, and Stalin sitting together and smiling at the Yalta conference, there at the beginning of this unit in our text. I suppose that war does make for "strange bedfellows" (and they look like they've just had several drinks apiece at some local seaside tavern). I guess they shared in the brief afterglow of having vanquished Hitler, so they might as well have enjoyed the moment. Things would soon turn "cold" again between Stalin and the West, and that is a large part of what this phase of history was all about- how quickly things change.
We've seen the cycles repeating here in our look at European history- new ideas or inventions create a division between liberal and conservative, rich and poor; unrest follows, finally war breaks out. Then rebuilding, more new ideas, resentments festering meantime in those who lost the last war, more unrest, and a new war begins. And so on... "Same as it ever was". Except the stakes seem to keep getting higher. Revolutions before the mid-20th century didn't have nuclear weapons at their disposal (or should I say for our potential permanent disposal)? And we're still haggling over the damned things...
But on to lighter fare. I loved the statement in the text "the fifties were a mobile and extrovert decade in Europe, full of the need to celebrate life, to compensate for the traumas of the war, and to overcome the anxieties of the atomic age. Vacations, travel... cocktail parties... jazz and rock and roll music became popular" (91). Well why not? After a few years of Hitler sending you to bomb-shelters and blowing up your neighbors, it might be time to unwind a little...
The avant-garde movement in art was a welcome development. "Strong coloring was typical for the artists... who took their inspiration from fairy tales, myths, children's drawings, [and] primitive art" (92). Joan Miro was a major influence. His works (such as the one at right) show a childlike simplicity and sense of color that reflected the mood of the times.
It has been a relatively long period of peace, overall, for the world (with some obvious exceptions among certain factions) since World War II. Do we dare to hope that there will never be another war on that scale- or is the worst yet to come? Will the cycles continue to repeat? What do you think?
Joan Miro. The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers. 1941.
Bonus Post
These are a few images I found online, based on the Cold War "Red Scare" that America went through in the 1950s- a very paranoid era when your next door neighbor could have been a communist, and the atomic bomb might fall out of the sky anytime. (Just search "red scare posters"- there's a lot of them). It's propaganda; some of it well-intended, some definitely incendiary. And quite surreal in retrospect.
The Walt Disney Company's "Mickey Mouse gas-mask"
for children; protection from nuclear fallout. .
Yes, artists are SO dangerous.
an anti-"Communists in Hollywood" tract 
@Tammi Smith:
Tammi- you are correct about the media's influence in the 60's, particularly television. That was the first decade that a majority of Americans and other western nation's citizens had TV sets, and the news took on an entirely new dimension. I was born on the very last day of 1960, and I can actually remember seeing the coverage of JFK's assassination in 1963 (didn't really understand the images I was seeing, but I sensed that my parents were upset about it).
There was a chant that a lot of the youth protesters used back then, when they saw the camera crews on the sidelines: "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" That dynamic forever changed what authority could "get away with"- witness the recent focus on police killings of unarmed suspects. Now we all have the means to be amateur reporters and capture video.
@Candace Chilcoat:
I really appreciate your remark that humans "stay constant" because it explains a lot when we look at the big picture. Human minds and impulses haven't changed all that much since the "hunter-gatherer" times- ten or twenty thousand years is not that big a chunk of time evolution-wise.. but technology has evolved exponentially in just a few centuries. Our brains, made of flesh and slower to adapt, cannot keep pace with the mechanical advances. We're all still "savages" deep down, surrounded by all these wondrous machines we've created, and the animal side of us lets it get out of hand. To the point that we have enough nuclear weapons to blow the planet up many times over. You're right- the aggression is still there, in our ids, to borrow from Freud. It's not going to be mutated out of us anytime soon, if ever.
icons at the top right corner of the subsection.