Post World Wars
After World War II the United States entered a long boom. It began with the baby boom in 1946, when a record 3.4 million babies were born, and about 4 million were born each year during the 1950s. Between 1945 and 1960 the gross national product more than doubled, from around $200 billion to more than $500 billion, so middle-class families had more money to spend than ever.
Many of those families moved to the suburbs. The GI Bill gave veterans home loans with no down payment, and mass-produced developments such as Levittown, New York, became the model of suburban living. Highways connected the suburbs to the cities, and homes filled up with washing machines and other new appliances. The new technology that changed daily life the most was television, and by 1953 two-thirds of American families owned one.
The decade also had a reputation for conformity, since postwar Americans wanted to keep their lives as normal as possible after the Depression and the war. However, within a few years the Beat movement (the “Beatniks”) began as a counterculture. Basically, mail kept up with the times too, and the 1954 Special Delivery stamp showed hands passing a letter.
Note
In this album, all of these pages are complete. I found recently the few stamps I’ve been missing. For a while, some of these pages were incomplete since I had been focusing on acquiring older U.S. stamps and then on Italian stamps in general. But now this one’s done.