Historical+Information

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At the time baseball was the major sport which everyone wanted to watch. The Yankees in paticular was the New York Team.

If you stepped into a classroom in the 1940s, you might see girls making dresses and boys training hard in physical education. At Crane Technical High School, physical education was very important because the principal wanted to keep all of the boys in tip-top shape for war. At Lucy Flower High School for girls, the students studied hat making, laundering, and beauty culture. Also, schools that had sewing classes, had a fashion show at the end of the year where the boys and girls alike would fashion what they had made.

It wasn’t untill the fifties that teenagers became independant as a group and listening to ther own music which was know as “hip”, “groovy”, or “cool”. Elvis was a huge hit of the fifties and this is when the phase of Rock N Roll began. Most parents thought Rock N Roll was unsuitable for a family audience but the teenagers loved him and thought he was the greatest thing on earth. No more listening to what their parents liked they were becoming more independant. But this was after Holden was a teenager and this is what he struggled with. Not having that ground between being a child and an adult.

The 1940s in New York are often seen as a Golden Age -- a decade when America emerged from the second World War as the globe's undisputed superpower, and New York City became, in a sense, the Capital of the World. Sports, finance, music, art -- New York was where it was at, and photographers worked overtime to capture glimpses of the energy, rhythm, and optimism that powered the city that never sleeps.