"The Cold War, Sputnik, Joseph McCarthy, Fidel Castro, the Rosenbergs, Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Parks, "Father Knows Best," and "Rebel Without a Cause" are just a few of the events, people, and cultural phenomena that marked the decade of the 1950s. This book - a collection of two hundred large-scale duotone photographs of the 1950s culled from the New York Times photo archives - brings this watershed period to life and examines who and what was important and why."--BOOK JACKET.