- Historic Sites The Fifty Biggest Changes in the Last Fifty
Years April/May 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 2 With American Heritage
approaching its fiftieth birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked
five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick
10 leading developments in American life during the last half-
century. In this issue Alien Barra, American Heritage ’s film
reviewer and a wide-ranging historian and cultural critic, whose
most recent books include Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and
Many Legends and Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball
Debates of the Last Century, selects the 10 biggest changes in
popular culture. In other issues this year our authorities offer
their choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in
politics; innovation and technology; business; and the home and
the family. This essay began as a listing of the 10 greatest
changes in popular culture in the past 50 years, but the more I
mulled it over, the more I grew convinced that the discussion
could have meaning