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semperfiona · 1 day ago

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"People have been telling stories about renewable energy since the nineteen-seventies, when the first all-solar-powered house opened on the campus of the University of Delaware, drawing a hundred thousand visitors in 1973, its first year, to marvel at its early photovoltaic panels and its solar hot-water system, complete with salt tubs in the basement to store heat overnight. But, even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as “alternative energy,” a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:

It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later [in 2024], and the third will arrive either later this year or early next [in 2025 or early 2026].

That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.

In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.

Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”

All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.

In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.

Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.

There are lots of other technologies vying to replace fossil fuels or to reduce climate damage: nuclear power, hydrogen power, carbon capture and storage; along with renewables, all were boosted by spending provisions in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and will be hampered to varying degrees by congressional rollbacks. Some may prove useful in the long run and others illusory, but for now they are statistically swamped by the sheer amount of renewable power coming online. Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world.

All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways...

In retrospect, it’s reasonably easy to see how fast solar and wind power were coming. But, blinkered by the status quo, almost no one actually predicted it. In 2009, the International Energy Agency predicted that we would hit two hundred and forty-four gigawatts of solar capacity by 2030; we hit it by 2015. For most of the past decade, the I.E.A.’s five-year forecasts missed [underestimated the amount of renewables] by an average of two hundred and thirty-five per cent. The only group that came even remotely close to getting it right was not J. P. Morgan Chase or Dow Jones or BlackRock. It was Greenpeace, which estimated in 2009 that we’d hit nine hundred and twenty-one total gigawatts by 2030. We were more than fifty per cent above that by 2023. Last summer, Jenny Chase, who has been tracking the economics of solar power for more than two decades for Bloomberg, told the Times, “If you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later, I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.”

-via The New Yorker, July 9, 2025

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semperfiona · 12 days ago

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Life in the Mid-Century US: a primer for fic writers

I read a lot of MASH fic recently, and while most of it was very good, there were also a ton of inaccuracies about what mid-century America was like. I'm not an expert, but at the same time, I did listen to my parents and grandparents when they talked about what life was like when they were younger. And also, I know what's changed within my lifetime (born in 1982), and quite a lot of things people today take for granted are actually new within my lifetime, and thus not around prior to the 1980s. Now, this is fanfic, and if you don't care about historical accuracy in your fic, that is a fine and valid choice and I salute you. If, however, you do want to at least try to avoid major gaffes, here are things I've noticed that people get wrong a lot:

Ms.

Nobody used "Ms." as an honorific prior to the 1970s, and it was highly political into the 1990s. Although the term was coined earlier, it was not part of the public consciousness until the publication of Ms. Magazine began in 1972. In the magazine's early years, when they called someone or answered the phone, they had to spell out the title of the magazine and explain it because nobody knew what it was. Before that, you were either a Miss (unmarried) or a Mrs. (married). There was no honorific for women that did not state your marital status. The magazine was highly influential, and people started knowing about and using "Ms.," but in the 70s and 80s, choosing to use it was a political choice, a way of asserting resistance to the dominant culture and adherence to feminist beliefs. I remember up through high school in the late 90s, depending on who you were talking to it could be a bit of a minefield, because "Ms." was very commonly used by then but some conservative women got offended if you used it, and some feminists got offended if you used Mrs/Miss.

Now, the thing is, while Ms. wasn't a formal title, people did not always articulate "Miss" and "Mrs." clearly. Depending on the dialect and situation (and whether or not you knew the marital status of the woman you were talking to) people might drawl or slur it so that it sounded like "Ms." But it was still meant as Miss or Mrs. And even if you pronounce Miss and Mrs. the same, you would write them as Miss and Mrs. unless you were doing really heavy-handed phonetically-written dialect. Like, "Gee, shucks, Miz Mailey, Ah don' reckon Ah kin do that." (In such heavy dialect, it would be spelled "Miz" and not Ms.)

Women's lives were restricted in many ways. Employers and schools were legally allowed to discriminate openly against women until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and after it they still discriminated, they just didn't advertise it in job listings). (Fun fact! The addition of "sex" as one of the categories you couldn't discriminate against was a late addition to the bill, designed to stop its passage, which fortunately didn't work.) In most places, women would have trouble opening a bank account in their own name without a man (usually a husband or father) to cosign for them until the 1970s.

There were a lot of places "good" women simply did not go, or didn't go alone. For example, before the 1960s, most women would not go to a bar. A club or dancehall or something upscale, sure, especially with a date or a group of friends. A bar … there were a lot of places where the majority of women in bars were working there, either as waitresses or as sex workers.

This doesn't mean that women didn't have fun; my grandmother spent the late 40s/early 50s dancing until 2 or 3 AM most Friday (and sometimes Saturday) nights. (Sometimes later.) She and a group of friends (men and women) would go to their local dance hall and dance until it closed, and then carpool to the nearest club that was still open, and sometimes to a third depending on how early the second one closed. She also spent a lot of time hanging out with friends at bowling alleys, drinking beer and bowling (this is how she met my grandfather). But I don't know if she ever set foot in a bar in her life, because for her generation, 'nice' women just didn't do that.

Travel:

Up through the 1960s, planes were the province of the rich and famous. Most people, when travelling long distances across America, would take a train or a bus or drive their own car. When travelling across the ocean, most people would take a passenger liner. Even very rich people and movie stars would take the train or ship instead of flying.

Long-distance car travel increased in the 50s and became more common. Among other things, the Interstates were built starting in 1956, making it much easier to navigate across the US when you went places you weren't personally familiar with.

Plane travel also increased, starting in the 1960s but exploding in the 1970s as the size and comfort of airplanes increased while the price per ticket dropped. Wide-body jets like the Boeing 747 could carry many more people per trip than earlier planes could, which meant a dramatic decrease in the price of tickets, which meant ordinary people could afford to fly places starting in the 1970s. The movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" came out in 1967, and in it a working-class couple flies from one end of California to the other on the spur of the moment. This is an astonishing novelty that is the standard topic of conversation they keep returning to when things get too fraught.

Car safety:

Cars were much different than today. Seatbelts did not come standard in most US cars until the 1960s, when the federal government required them. There was a series of ad campaigns starting in the 1960s encouraging people to buckle up. Even then, many people didn't actually use seatbelts, and when laws requiring people to wear their seatbelts started being enacted by states in the 1980s there was a lot of grumbling and pushback about "having to wear a seatbelt" being an unreasonable intrusion into peoples' lives.

I know a woman who was a poor single mother in the late 1970s. She had two kids, and drove a then-20-year-old car (i.e. made in the 1950s) that didn't have seatbelts. The two kids would sit in the front passenger seat next to her, and any time she had to jam on the brakes unexpectedly she would throw out her hand to catch them if they slid forward. I know this because this reflex got written deep in her brain and she will still sometimes throw out a hand if she has to brake suddenly.

Kids sat in the front seat all the time. Airbags didn't become standard in cars until the same safety-push in the 1980s that got states to require using a seatbelt! No airbags=no reason short people can't ride up front. If there was an adult passenger they got the front passenger seat and the kids were in the back, but if the only adult was the driver, the kids would usually sit in the front. You know what else became a Thing in the 1980s? Car seats for children! Because if you have to be buckled in, and you have a three-point safety belt, it's going to be dangerous for a small child, so you need a special seat for the child to protect them, and voila, the carseat was born.

On a less serious note, for the first half of the century cars were not equipped with a way to heat the cabin. There were a variety of aftermarket add-ons and optional features, of varying quality. GM was the first auto maker in the US to include a heater as a standard amenity in every car they made, starting in 1962. This expanded to all automakers in 1968 when federal safety standards started requiring windshield defrosting, which required a heater.

Money and credit:

Credit cards were not common until the 1980s. They existed before that, but most people didn't have them—they tended to be used by business executives and people like that, for the first several decades they existed. Instead, people paid most things by cash or check. It was fairly common for people to carry around large sums in cash for just that reason. Businesses could (and did) refuse to take a check for any reason, because just having a checkbook didn't mean you had the money in the bank to cover that purchase, and (unlike with a credit card) if you didn't have the money in your account, the bank wouldn't pay the store and the check would "bounce." Naturally, women, people of color, visibly queer people, and people from out of town were the most likely to get businesses just randomly deciding not to take their checks.

People without credit cards did still have access to credit, however! The most common type was store credit. That is, they would have an account with the store they were buying from and when the purchased something on credit they would then have a monthly bill to the store until it was paid off. Nicole Rudolph has a great video about the history of store credit and credit cards (focusing on how it affected women, specifically).

When people did have credit cards, they were a lot more cumbersome to use than today. There were no chips, and not even any magnetic stripes. The cards would be embossed with your name and credit card number, and the business would have a small metal and plastic device called an imprinter that the card would be fitted into. (The device would have a metal plate with the business name embossed on it.) A three-layer carbon-copy receipt would be filled out by hand, signed by the purchaser, and place on top of the card in the imprinter. Then the imprinting arm would be dragged across the top of the receipt and credit card, imprinting the name and number from the card (and the business's info) into the carbon paper of the receipt. The customer would get the top copy of the receipt, the business would keep a copy, and the last copy would be sent to the credit card company who would then pay the business. It was cumbersome, slow, and easily spoofed, which is why a lot of businesses just didn't bother to even take credit cards until the 80s.

Oh, and credit card companies, then as now, take a percentage of every purchase made with a credit card, which is another reason a lot of businesses were slow to accept them and would often have minimum charges. Also, if a business did take credit cards, they might not take all of them, because they had to have an account with the credit card company in question. By the 1980s Visa was the most common, and if a business only took one it would be that; American Express was a lot less common because they took a higher percentage of the purchase.

Alcohol:

American consumption of alcohol has changed over the decades. It was very common through the middle of the 20th Century for people to drink regularly, but less heavily. There were people who had a glass or two of spirits every night; it was common for homes to have a bar with alcohol in various types ready for consumption, though in many homes they didn't actually drink unless there was company. However, there was far less binge drinking. It happened, but it was less common. There was also far less understanding of alcoholism, and far less awareness of it. People that we would today understand as "functional alcoholics" were not really on the radar of society as having a problem. Addiction was seen primarily as a moral issue, not a social issue or a trauma issue or a medical issue. This is still true today, but less universally so.

There was also less awareness of "drunk driving" as a problem. Sure, people drove drunk and sometimes killed people (or themselves) by accident. But this was mostly accepted as a normal tragedy, and just part of life. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded in 1980 and grew quickly to prominence in the 80s, with very effective advocacy, advertising, and consciousness-raising. This helped spur a national conversation about alcohol and driving that resulted in laws against drunk driving throughout the nation. The most effective slogan for changing behavior was "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk," (from the Ad Council, not MADD). See, the first thing that goes when you're drunk or high is judgment. People always think they're less impaired than they actually are, so asking people not to drive when they're drunk is futile, because even people who are absolutely hammered are going to think they're fine. Asking people to intervene in their friends' behavior was more effective, because people want to help and protect their friends and also tend to be more objective about other peoples' level of impairment than they are about their own.

Childcare:

Until the 1970s and the rise of women's lib, childcare centers and daycare centers were rare. Most middle-class and working-class mothers did not work outside the home; only poor mothers and lower-income working-class mothers did so. And they usually couldn't pay for childcare. So there wasn't a demand for daycare in the modern sense. When childcare was needed, it was usually provided by family members or neighbors (because most people had female relatives or neighbors who were home all day) or older children in the family.

There was a much more laissez-faire attitude to childrearing. Most parents expected kids to be out playing with friends all day from the time they were in elementary school. On days they weren't in school, kids might not even come home for meals, instead eating at whatever friend's house they were nearest when mealtime came around. Girls were more likely to be kept close to home so they could help with chores, but even girls were given a great deal of freedom. Most adults in the neighborhood would keep an eye out for the kids and intervene if they were doing something really bad or really dangerous, but for the most part the kids were left alone to play however they wanted. Sometimes this was a good thing (it allowed kids to develop independence, problem solving skills, and just generally figuring out how to live without their parents breathing down their necks) and sometimes it was a bad thing (if the kids got into danger over their heads, or if the parents used this as an excuse to neglect their children). Freedom to explore and learn and grow is great. Not being there to help when your kids really do need help is not.

CN: child abuse

Physical punishment was the norm, including using things like belts, wooden spoons, and fly swatters to spank children. This was not considered child abuse unless it was extreme, or if it left scars, or if the child was beaten anywhere other than the buttocks. Not everyone used physical punishment, but most did, and there was almost no awareness of other means of enforcing boundaries and modifying behavior. In the 70s research started coming out that hurting children as a form of "discipline" was not very effective and often caused long-term psychological damage. While some embraced this, most people did not. In the first place, it would require them to admit the damage they had from the "discipline" their parents inflicted on them, and also require them to admit that (despite meaning well) they were hurting their kids. In the second place, the advocates of no-physical-punishments didn't often have very good advice for how to enforce boundaries and discipline in children without hurting them. There was also a faction of young left-wing parents in the 1970s who had an extreme "anything goes!" approach to parenting, believing that setting any boundaries or expectations or structure was harmful for kids. They also did damage to their kids, because children need boundaries and structure both for protection and as a guide for growth. Unfortunately, they were an excuse for parents who believed in physical discipline to dismiss all the research as merely the product of people who believed children should not have boundaries or structure.

Communications:

Obviously, they didn't have the internet or cell phones! But even the way people used landlines was much different. In the early part of the 20th Century, most phones were on a "party line." That is, each street would have one phone line, and every home on the block (that had a phone) would share the same line. Only one house could be making a phone call at a time. Anybody on the block who picked up the phone and listened could hear whatever phone call was happening at that moment. While listening in on other peoples' conversations was considered rude, nosy people still did it. Each house would have a different pattern of rings so that you could tell by listening to the phone ring which house a particular call was for. They did this because it was a lot cheaper than each house having its own dedicated connection, especially in rural areas. This was standard up through the 1980s in many places. People who lived in cities often had individual lines in the 60s, but in rural areas party lines were not replaced until technology changes in the 80s automated a lot of things. The last party lines in the US were not replaced until the early 2000s. Income level also matters; even in the early days, wealthy people could pay to get private phone lines instead of party lines.

On a party line, you can never be 100% sure your phone conversation is not being overheard by a nosy neighbor. Usually, you could hear a click or other background noise when they picked up the phone, but not always; and if they got to the phone and picked it up before you did, there wasn't anything to hear. In addition, most houses had only one phone, installed in a central place where it was accessible to everyone. Even if your neighbors weren't listening in, the operator might be, if it was a slow day. As you can imagine, this meant that most people didn't even try to have private or confidential conversations over the phone. If you wanted to talk about something private, you did it in person or in a letter. (Tampering with a physical letter, once it has been handed over to the post office, is a federal crime.)

The other thing about phones before cell phones and the internet was that long distance was a big deal. Every phone call, before the automated telephone exchange became common in the 70s and 80s, required an operator to manually connect the call. Every town or local area had an exchange. (In cities, big enough buildings sometimes had their own operator.) If you were calling someone in another town—even the town next door!—that required more people. Your operator would call the operator in the town you were calling, and they would connect the call. It took time and people power, and that means money. Also, the further your call was going, the more time it took on the line. Before fiber-optic cables were developed, the number of calls any one line could handle at any one time was sharply limited. Scarce resources tend to cost more, and long-distance calls used up more resources. Calls were divided up into three categories: local, long-distance, and (later) international. Local calls were fairly cheap; you could talk on a local call for hours relatively inexpensively (although a long call might annoy the others in your house or on your party line, as it meant they couldn't send or receive calls).

Long distance calls were different. They were very expensive, and charged by the minute. And the earlier you go in the century, the lower the audio quality would be, and the harder and more expensive (and thus rare) they were. In his 1986 album "Graceland" Paul Simon has a song called "The Boy in the Bubble" which is all about the technological achievements of the 20th century (positive and negative) and their effects on people. The chorus starts "These are the days of miracle and wonder/This is the long distance call."

Usually, "local" meant your town and the towns nearest you (perhaps every town in your county) and "long distance" was everything outside of that. It was expensive enough that even middle and upper-middle-class people didn't call long-distance very often, and when they did, they certainly didn't stay on the line for long conversations. If you wanted to communicate with someone who lived far away, you wrote letters. The price of long distance calls decreased over time relative to the cost of living, but even in the 90s a long distance call was expensive enough that I always thought twice before placing one. (One of the major drivers for cell phone usage in the early 2000s was the fact that some cell phone plans charged the same for long distance as they did for local calls.) As for international calls, those were extremely expensive. Each individual long distance or international call would be a line item on your phone bill for the next month. But in all of this, remember that usually you got charged to make calls but not to receive them. That is, if you picked up the phone and dialed your friend in the next state over and talked for two minutes, the call would be on your phone bill, not your friend's phone bill.

If you wanted to call someone and you didn't have the money but they did, you could place a collect call. You would dial the operator and tell them you wanted to place a collect call, that is, a call where the charges were paid not by the person initiating the call but by the person who received it. This was more expensive than a regular call. The operator would connect the call, and ask the person if they wanted to accept the charges (that is, were they willing to pay for the call). If they said yes, the call went on their phone bill. If they said no, the operator ended the call and nobody paid for it. This meant that if you were poor and you needed to signal something, you could do it by placing a collect call that you knew was going to be rejected. So, for example, if you had an abusive husband and needed a friend to come pick you up in an emergency, you could arrange with them ahead of time that if you called collect they needed to come pick you up. In the days of in-person operators, you couldn't do this too often because they would notice. But once automated switchboards came into common use in the 1980s, you could use collect calls for lots of things on a regular basis. You'd place a collect call, the system would dial it, when the person picked up the system would ask you to say your name so they'd know who was calling and could decide whether to accept charges … but there wasn't a real person listening, so you could say something besides your name, as long as it was quick. Like, "Practice is over, time to come pick me up."

So what did you do if you were out and about and needed to make a call? Well, if you were at a friend's house or a business and the call was local, you might ask to use their phone. Or you could use a payphone! Payphones were common in urban areas, and they were coin operated. You could either pay for time as you went, or you could place a collect call. This is where the fake-collect-call to pass on messages was most useful.

Landline phones did not need a power cord. The cable that carried the audio sound also carried a small electric charge—it had to, in order to ring the bell in the phone so you would know when you were being called. This literally saved lives, because even when the power was out the phones still worked. Today the old-style analog audio cables are gone in the US. Even if you have an old-style phone that jacks into an old-style port, everything on the phone company's side is VOIP (Voice Over IP), which sends sound through the internet instead of dedicated phone lines. It's a lot cheaper this way, because they're only maintaining one set of cables. But it means that when the power goes out and the cell phone towers get overloaded (for instance, in a natural disaster), all phone service goes down … which did not happen in the 20th Century.

Leftist terms and concepts

Many of the terms and concepts common in liberal spaces these days did not even exist until the 1970s or 1980s and weren't really part of common consciousness until later. Intersectionalism? The term was coined by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1989 and was an obscure legal theory until the early 2000s. Colonialism was a little earlier, being first written about in the 1960s and popularized by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism. But when I say "popularized" I don't mean that everybody knew what it was in the sense that we understand the term today, I mean "academic left-wing people in the 80s knew what it was."

Even the social-justice ideas that did exist tended not to be very well known outside of small activist communities. For the vast majority of Americans, there simply wasn't a way to access the communities and resources that talked about such ideas. Even if it got published, your local bookstore or library probably wouldn't carry it because it wouldn't sell well enough or be checked out often enough, and they certainly weren't putting it in newspapers and on television. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had an extreme chilling effect, but even besides that, without the internet, it was just harder to connect and share information. That's why "consciousness-raising" was such a big thing in the 1960s, especially in feminist circles. Groups of people getting together and talking about problems that they had all experienced individually but which society decreed were "normal" or "right" or simply ignored. The idea was that people would go "oh, I didn't realize, but you're right, that is messed up!" and break out of the dominant cultural paradigm. But unless you were already leftist-leaning, and in an area that had a lot of leftists (like a big city or a college/university), you wouldn't have much access to such things.

So what, you may ask, did they know about? What would you expect the average person on the street (especially the average white person) to know? What signals that they are good/liberal in that context? The problem for the author who is trying to be historically accurate is that quite a lot of the rhetoric that is currently right-wing rhetoric on the subject of race and gender and sexuality was actually left-wing in the 60s and 70s. That's how far the conversation has moved.

If you have specific concepts or terms for various ideologies that you want your character to know, or you want to check what they would realistically have known about, the best place to check is Google Ngrams (books.google.com/ngrams/). Google Ngrams has the text of the vast majority of books published in the 20th Century in its database, and it will tell you how common a particular word (or series of words) were over time.

Ad Council

The Ad Council is an American non-profit founded in 1942 to produce, distribute, and promote public service announcements on behalf of other organizations (usually either charities, nongovernmental organizations, or the US Government). And they're really good at what they do; they have changed the conversation on a bunch of issues, over the years. Looking at a list of their influential campaigns can tell you a lot about public awareness of issues and what was going on culturally at any one time. Ad Council slogans include: "Only you can prevent forest fires!," "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," "Loose lips sink ships," "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" (encouraging people to give to scholarship funds), and many others. Some of their campaigns have been great forces for good. At other times, they've been a government propaganda machine. But they are a useful barometer of mainstream American awareness of various issues. Looking at the wiki page to see what campaigns they've run in various eras can give you an idea of what issues were in the public consciousness.

Like many public service announcements, the Ad Council doesn't usually pay for airtime on radio and TV. Instead, their pieces are given out to stations to use whenever they have unsold commercial time. So, for example, if there are eight commercial slots during a half-hour program, and the station only has seven commercials sold, they'll put in an Ad Council PSA for the eighth slot. This means the Ad Council doesn't control when their stuff is aired.

Entertainment

There were far fewer forms of entertainment at your finger tips. There were movies, radio, and television, of course, but there were far fewer channels. For television, nationwide there were three for-profit TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and one non-profit network (PBS, launched in 1970). Each area would have local affiliate stations, which broadcast content from the network they belonged to, plus maybe a bit of original content if it was a big station. Most stations would have a half hour of nightly news twice an evening; later in the 20th century that changed to an hour long nightly news show. If you wanted any news more in-depth than what you could get in a half-hour broadcast, you read the newspaper.

There were books and albums, but the selection was far smaller unless you were in an area with enough population density to have specialty stores, or were ordering from a catalog. Unlike digital distribution, physical items take space to store and display and sell. Physical stores are limited in the amount of merchandise they can offer, and can't afford to keep anything in stock that will not sell reasonably quickly. Which means that it has to appeal to the broadest demographic. It doesn't matter if there are 100,000 people in the US who would be thrilled to buy a book with a certain theme if they are spread out evenly across the US, because there won't be enough of them in any one city to form the customer base for a store to cater to. Specialty printing presses did exist, which sold mostly by catalog and through niche shops in large cities, but there were far fewer than there are today. When a book or album came out, it would be in the stores for about a year, and then it would disappear, never to be seen again. Only extremely popular stuff would be reprinted, simply because of shelf space. If your favorite record broke or got scratched, you could probably only replace it if you were lucky enough to find one in a second-hand store.

Blue Laws

Most states had laws limiting what businesses could be open on Sundays. Most stores, for example, were not permitted to be open on Sundays. Restaurants and hotels, yes; shops and bars, no. For this reason, it was common in many areas for people to go visiting on Sunday afternoons—there wasn't much you could do besides go to your friends' houses and hang out. Blue laws started being repealed in the 80s; some are still on the books in some states.

Given the narrower range of entertainment options in general, and especially on Sundays, people spent a lot more time inviting friends over. Lots of people had standing card games, where a group of friends would meet regularly at someone's house for dinner and cards. Sometimes these groups would be mixed-gender, sometimes not. Mixed-gender card parties were usually in the evenings or on weekends, as were men's card parties, because men worked during the day. Women's card parties (at least for middle and upper class women) were usually during the day because they didn't work outside the home. A wide variety of games were played (bridge, poker, canasta, whist, pinochle, hearts, etc., etc.) but poker was usually reserved for male-only card games. Playing basic board games like Sorry and Life and Scrabble was also quite a common activity either for children or for the whole family.

Police

There was a certain ambivalence to the police in popular culture; the idea of cops as the "thin blue line" protecting Good People from "thugs" didn't become dominant until the 80s with the sharp rise in violence, drug use, and dogwhistle politics. This combined with the New Jim Crow efforts to criminalize people of color while valorizing police in the public consciousness. Prior to this point, cops were only sometimes portrayed positively in popular culture. There were good cops, bad cops, folksy-down-home cops, corrupt cops, lazy cops, a whole gamut. For every Dragnet (TV show about police detectives) there was a Smokey and the Bandit (movie about trucks/races and smuggling where cops are ineffective buffoon villains). They were not yet central to the culture wars.

In addition, US police forces had not yet begun their march to militarization and huge budgets. SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics) were only created in the late 1960s in response to a series of sniping incidents against civilians. They were quite rare, initially, and only found in very large cities. They did not become part of the common consciousness until the 80s. Police did not begin to equip themselves with military surplus until after 9/11. A beat cop in the 50s would have a sidearm, and possibly a shotgun in the trunk of his car; the most backup he could call would be a squad of cops similarly armed (but he might not have a radio to call them with; he might have to stop and ask to use someone's phone). Obviously, a group of men with shotguns and handguns can do a lot of damage, but still less than the same group of men with body armor, riot shields, tear gas, and heavier weapons.

These are just a few of the things that have changed in the last fifty years. And, of course, I'm only one person and might have got things wrong. Let me know if you see things I missed.

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#us history #Old enough to remember a lot of this #the world has changed dramatically in my lifetime #and not always for the better

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