But both turned their backs on the promises of postwar optimism.

How lasting is the postwar optimism?

Disturbing and original, this novel of adolescents on the run in the 1960's shows the scars beneath postwar American optimism.

It is a big, happy bubble of postwar American optimism.

It was a new kind of amplified dance music, cheaper and louder than the music of the big bands, and full of postwar optimism.

"I've always described it as the height of post-New Deal, postwar optimism in government," Mr. Bullock said.

They were of course indicative of their period, whether that period was pre-war (escapism) or postwar (optimism).

The crash, in fact, seems to be taking its place alongside other, very different, national traumas that have eaten away at America's boundless postwar optimism and sense of well-being.

Wonder bread, for instance, the apogee of grain refinement, gained popularity in the age of American postwar optimism.

Amid the postwar optimism and prosperity, few could imagine that the appetite for modernity's fruit might not be universally shared.