With the ending of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began the decades-long confrontation known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on 'containment'—preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground—and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But May was one of the first to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together. Piecing together evidence from a wide range of sources, 1988's Homeward Bound draws a convincing picture of how US culture in the 1950s contained and constrained its own people, particularly women.