Deliberate Speed

[Dave Monroe]

Back in print ...

Lhamon, W.T., Jr.  Deliberate Speed:
   The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American
   1950's.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.

"W.T. Lhamon's Deliberate Speed is a cultural history
of the 1950s in the United States that directly
confronts the typical view of this decade as an arid
wasteland. By surveying the artistic terrain of the
period - examining works by figures as varied as Miles
Davis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg,
Little Richard, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock,
Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--Lhamon
demonstates how many of the distinctive elements that
so many attribute to the revolutionary period of the
1960s had their roots in the fertile soil of the
1950s. Taking his title from Chief Justice Earl
Warren's desegregation decree of 1955, Lhamon shows
how this phrase, 'deliberate speed,' resonates
throughout the culture of the entire decade. The 1950s
was a period of transition--a time when the United
States began its shift from an industrial society to a
postindustrial society, and the era when the first
barriers between African-American culture and white
culture began to come down. Deliberate Speed is the
story of a nation and a culture making the rapid
transition to the increasingly complex world that we
inhabit today."

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LHADEX.html

First published by the Smithsonian Institution
Press in 1990.  See Ch. 6, "'Keep Cool, But Care,'"
pp. 193-25.  And note the new cover.  But Duke UP's
STILL gotta do something about those URLs ...

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