Economist and political scientist W. W. Rostow (1916-) served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His influential work, Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto , presents his theory that all nations must pass through five stages of economic growth before reaching maturity, a stage that he describes as the Age of High Mass Consumption and which he maintains the United States had fully achieved during the post-World War II decade.
Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) represented Arizona in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1964 and from 1968 to 1986. He won the 1964 republican presidential nomination only to lose in a landslide to the incumbent Lyndon Johnson. Nevertheless, Goldwater's nomination represented a breakthrough for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. His acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco reflects many of the issues and themes that conservatives would rally around during later decades.
In 1964-65, President Lyndon Johnson proposed and was largely successful in enacting the most ambitious program of domestic legislation since the New Deal. In a 1964 speech at the University of Michigan Johnson presents his vision of the Great Society.
After World War II, Alfred and William Levitt built a series of housing developments known as Levittowns that consisted of large numbers of small, uniform, single-family homes with modern conveniences. White working and middle-class families who had previously lived in cities desired the conveniences and small-town atmosphere that the Levittowns afforded. Sociologist Herbert Gans examines Levittown, New Jersey in this 1967 article.