Ruby Sisson Library

Provides accounts of key events that occurred during the 1950s in the areas of science, technology, transportation, the economy, society, literature, art and architecture, fashion, stage and screen, music, sports and recreation, and war, and includes photographs and primary sources.

For a small-town girl with a big dream in 1955, there is no address more glamorous than New York's Barbizon Hotel. Laura, a patrician beauty from Smith, arrives in its vaunted halls to work at Mademoiselle for the summer. Her hopelessly romantic roommate Dolly comes from a working-class upstate town to attend secretarial school. Vivian, a brash, redheaded British bombshell with a disregard for the hotel's rules, rounds out the unlikely trio of friends....

"Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city's biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can't let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy. Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely...

"From the bestselling author of If I Were You comes a nostalgic and endearing holiday story that reminds us that sometimes, the most meaningful gifts are the ones we least expect and don't deserve. Best friends Audrey Barrett and Eve Dawson are looking forward to celebrating Christmas in postwar America, thrilled at the prospect of starting new traditions with their five-year-old sons. But when the Sears Christmas Wish Book arrives and the boys start...

"In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese, with terrible consequences for both of them and for members of their fragile community, who will betray one another in the darkest days of the war." "Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired...

In rural Louisiana of the 1950's, two young sisters share everything together, until they meet a young man to whom they are both attracted.

"In the wake of two extremely high-profile murder cases, and with the summer of 1957 finally winding down, Constable Twitten is eagerly anticipating a quiet spell at work. But his hoped-for rest is interrupted when he and his colleagues find a trio of bodies, all murdered with the same unusual weapon: a milk bottle. The three victims are seemingly unconnected--a hardworking patrolman, a would-be beauty queen, and a catty BBC radio personality--so...

The nostalgic comedy set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin focused on the Cunninghams and their two kids, Richie and Joanie, and their relationship with Fonzie, a motorcycle-riding Casanova who became a pop-culture phenomenon.

"A bold and original argument that upends the myth of the Fifties as a decade of conformity to celebrate the solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines"-- "The Fifties is a dazzling and provocative work of history that transforms our understanding of a seemingly staid decade and honors the pioneers of gay rights, feminism, civil...