I was born in the 80’s and raised in the 90’s, and was firmly molded as a person in the 2000’s but based on the media available even I get a twinge of nostalgia thinking about the '50s with the white picket fences and poodle skirts.
The reasons for 1960s nostalgia are pretty obvious to me: though a lot of bad stuff went on (Vietnam), a lot of good was accomplished (civil rights, women’s rights, and the beginnings of the gay rights movement), and the cultural ferment was really quite amazing, especially in music. (The music of the decade beginning with 1964 completely outclasses that of any decade since, and I say that as someone who barely tolerates classic-rock stations anymore, because I’ve heard most of those songs enough for one lifetime already, thankyewverymuch.)
You forgot the tv show “Happy Days” which was on from 1974-1984 and all of us kids grew up watching the Fonz. Even “Family Guy” gives homage to it.
Rock and Roll was totally American back then. We didnt have the British invasion until 1961 when the Beetles came in.
Born in '53, which probably makes it natural for me to prefer the sixties over the fifties. So many people defying the power structure has been a lifelong influence on my core philosophies.
I loved my Mom’s stories about the 50’s. She even still had a few old pictures. One was of her and her friends, thinking they were cool, with rolled up jeans, curlers in their hair (with a scarve covering them) all holding on to a cigarette.
Honest to God, it was like a scene out of Grease.
She would tell me about the hard times and the good times. The thing that struck me is that people who grew up in the 50’s were so much more greatful then.
She would tell me about the one radio they would huddle around. How they could only use part of their apartment in the winter, because they could not afford to heat the living room.
One of her favorite memories is when the ice man used to come. While the iceman was delivering the ice, the kids would run up to the wagon, and chip off some ice to eat. Everything we take for granted now, was all new back then, and every new invention was awe inspiring.
The music was good, the clothes were stylish, the hair was always done just right.
From as early as I can remember I swore I was born in the wrong decade (60’s). How fun it would be to live in the 40’s and 50’s, I can only imagine.
Of course, I do not think of all the bad back then, discrimination, shoddy health care, no machines that will do everything for you.
But still, I am just a hopeless romantic for times I will never see. 
Beatles - 1964
American Graffiti is set in 1962, in it a character laments that music has been shit since Buddy Holly died (1959). He was already nostalgic for the 1950s. 
He was pretty much objectively right about the music, though.
Nostalgia comes from the people who do movies and TV thinking about when they were young. When I was a kid, in the late '50s early '60s, people were nostalgic about the 20s. There was a Roaring 20s TV show, the Untouchables, Thoroughly Modern Millie, lots more. My HS history teacher was nostalgic about the Prohibition Era and Izzis and Moe. Nothing unique about it.
I get nostalgic for '20s nostalgia.
Also a generation of men returned from active duty. After years of living in shitty conditions, wondering if they were going to live to see morning, the 50’s must have seemed grand.
This is true. Even though I think the 60s was the greatest era of Humankind, a big part of the collective nostalgia for the 50s and 60s is that mature folks have fond memories of that time. In the 60s, folks my age were born before 1910. Of course they were pining for the days of their own youth. Even Gay '90s nostalgia was a thing, with pizza parlors and ice cream shops pushing 19th century motifs and Westerns ruling prime-time. Whether anyone will care about the 1990s henceforth is less certain. I can’t imagine what they’d miss, except maybe the X-Files.
I was born in 1960.
Nostalgia is my middle name. I’ve decorated my house to look like a 1940’s men’s club. I still play records!
I have several Victorian outfits, loved putting on formal clothes. I own about 150 DVD’s of old movies.
Weird.
I’ve seen your telephone.
The thing about the 50s is that the nation had been through two decades of shit. The 30s had the Great Depression, and the 40s had WWII.
Then the 50s came around, and suddenly we had peace–mostly, anyway. We had tremendous economic expansion, widespread prosperity, people who had been dirt poor dirt farmers in the 30s and getting their asses shot off in the 40s now had a steady job at the factory, a house in the suburbs, a car, electricity, phones, TV, teenagers in school instead of working. All that stuff existed back in the 20s, but it was only novelties for the rich. The depression and war meant that no one could afford those things. So we had two or three decades of technological improvement suddenly available for the mass market.
This is what nostalgia for the 50s is about. No wonder the 50s were about conformity–who wants to ruin a good thing? And then kids who grew up in the 50s and became teenagers and young adults in the 60s thought the 50s were NORMAL. They didn’t live through the depression and the war, they didn’t realize how good they had it compared to the shit their parents went through. And so the prosperity of the 50s created the “anything can happen” experimentation of the 60s. And so you have nostalgia for the 60s.
All this is for, you know, white middle class people.
And then the 70s rolled around, and people started to realize that no, utopia was not just around the corner, you could remake and remold the world only so much, and the radical changes of the war, the boom, the depression, the next war, and unexpected prosperity were now played out and we have a long period of muddling through that pretty much continues to this day.
We had a period of similar cultural continuity between the Civil War and WWI–things changed, the west was colonized, technology shifted, but there was a sort of sameness.
You aren’t really nostalgic for a different era if the past is pretty much the same as the present. A guy in the 70s could look back at the 50s and think how different everything was, even though it was only 20 years ago. Looking back at 1994 from 2014 and while there have been some changes–we could list them–it doesn’t seem like kids in the 90s or 80s had a radically different life than kids today.
I think there’s a good chunk of truth to this, and I think it compounds other factors.
My generation doesn’t seem to have the same kind of nostalgia for the 70s and 80s. We take a positive view of music back then (justifiably) and a wry view of other pop culture (outside of the best movies and TV shows, it was pretty kitschy/crappy), but few of us want to go back and live then either as adults or children.
As I said on Facebook:
That and fedoras.
Curious to what extent '50s/'60s nostalgia exists beyond the US. In Ireland the 1950s are recalled as priest-ridden, repressed, impoverished and backward. I dunno how they’re thought of in Canada and Britain.
And it works now!
Canada has the same 50s/60s nostalgia as the States. Our cultures and economies were pretty much on par, and all the US icons were our icons too.
Jobs were plentiful and times were good.
Our cultures still are obviously intertwined. It’s only been in the last maybe 30 years that Canadians have been trying to seek out our own identity, but we still ride on the coattails of the US. No doubt about it.
Hereis table with crime rates from 1960-2012.