After some 20 years of financial hardship and world war, the 1950s finally ushered in an era of peace and prosperity for the majority of Americans. Life in suburbia, with its cookie-cutter family homes and white picket fences, became the ideal, while a renewed economy sparked the return of big spending. But as the United States grew on the world stage, discord brewed in its backyard, with the civil rights and anti-communist movements bearing the nation’s cracks for all to see. 

Click through this gallery to see the conformity, consumerism and Cold War tensions of 1950s America caught on camera…