The 1960s continue to be the subject of passionate debate and political controversy, a touchstone in struggles over the meaning of the American past and the direction of the American future. Amid the polemics and the myths, making sense of the Sixties and its legacies presents a challenge. This book is for all those who want to take it on. Because there are so many facets to this unique and transformative era, this volume offers multiple approaches and perspectives. The first section gives a lively narrative overview of the decade's major policies, events, and cultural changes. The second presents ten original interpretative essays from prominent historians about significant and controversial issues from the Vietnam War to the sexual revolution, followed by a concise encyclopedia articles organized alphabetically. This section could stand as a reference work in itself and serves to supplement the narrative. Subsequent sections include short topical essays, special subjects, a brief chronology, and finally an extensive annotated bibliography with ample information on books, films, and electronic resources for further exploration. With interesting facts, statistics, and comparisons presented in almanac style as well as the expertise of prominent scholars, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s is the most complete guide to an enduringly fascinating era.

A definitive account of the turbulent 1960s, "America Divided" presents the most sophisticated understanding to date of all sides of the decade's many political, social, and cultural conflicts. 45 photos.

In America in the Sixties, Greene goes beyond the clichés and synthesizes thirty years of research, writing, and teaching on one of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Greene sketches the well-known players of the period—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Betty Friedan—bringing each to life with subtle detail. He introduces the reader to lesser-known incidents of the decade and offers fresh and persuasive insights on many of its watershed events. Combining an engrossing narrative with intelligent analysis, America in the Sixties enriches our understanding of that pivotal era.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade whose conflicts shattered America’s postwar order and divide us still. On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, social violence, and the blowback of a “silent majority” shredded the American fabric. Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period’s fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam war unfolds as Cold War policy, high-stakes politics buffeted by powerful popular movements, and searing in-country experience. Americans’ challenges to government regulation of sexuality yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion. Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism. The Shattering illuminates currents that still run through our politics. It is a history for our times.

A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

This book examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and the independent and experimental films.

Reflecting on the 1960s at 50: A Concise Account of How the 1960s Changed America, for Better and for Worse is a punchy, conversational look at some of the most interesting pieces of cultural and social conflict from the ‘60s, reflected through the lens of our own vantage point today. This approachable, informative volume uses transcripts of public interviews to provide the viewpoints of half a dozen nationally known scholars with long records of writing in scholarly and popular realms. They represent a range of disciplinary and political perspectives from the humanities to the social sciences and from the progressive left to the conservative right. These scholars offer their thoughts on: the place of youth in American society that emerged from the ‘60s the lingering contributions the counterculture made to American institutions and social life the legacy in contemporary America of the struggles over racial disparities in the ‘60s the ways in which the revolution of sexual mores and relations of that decade have affected marriage and family today the war in Vietnam and its effects on contemporary views of America’s military power and responsibility in the world the evolution of American state power and administration that was energized by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. This book will be of interest to students of American history and the history and politics of the 1960s as well as sociologists. It searches for meaning in a period that made major contributions to the shape of America as a country.