Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s.

Breaking from the dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or the rise of postmodernism, Back to the Fifties reveals how Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988 was utilized by a range of audiences for diverse and often competing agendas. Films from American Gra...