Madison made history in the sixties. Landmark civil rights laws were passed. Pivotal campus protests were waged. A spring block party turned into a three-night riot. Factor in urban renewal troubles, a bitter battle over efforts to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace, and the expanding influence of the University of Wisconsin, and the decade assumes legendary status. In this first-ever comprehensive narrative of these issues—plus accounts of everything from politics to public schools, construction to crime, and more—Madison historian Stuart D. Levitan chronicles the birth of modern Madison with style and well-researched substance. This heavily illustrated book also features annotated photographs that document the dramatic changes occurring downtown, on campus, and to the Greenbush neighborhood throughout the decade. Madison in the Sixties is an absorbing account of ten years that changed the city forever.

As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.

We are just beginning to understand the power of local history to enhance our understanding of ourselves, our cities, and our culture. It is, after all, that stratum of history that touches our lives most closely. Madison answers the basic questions of when, where, why, how, and by whom Madison, Wisconsin was developed. The book is richly detailed, fully documented, inclusive in coverage, and delightfully readable. More than 300 illustrations provide a vivid feeling for what life was like in Madison during the formative years. David Mollenhoff's unique interpretive framework emphasizing public policies and community values, gives the book a consistent interpretive quality and reveals major themes that flow through time. This combination will allow you to see the city's growth and development with unusual clarity and coherence--almost as if you were watching time-lapse photography. When Mollenhoff began to study Madison's history, he was delighted by his early discoveries but frustrated because no one had written a book-length history of Madison since 1876. Finally, in 1972 he decided to write that book. His research required him to read five miles of microfilm, piles of theses and dissertations, shelves of reports, boxes of manuscripts and letters, and to study thousands of photographs. Soon after the first edition was published in 1982, readers declared it to be a classic. For this second edition Madison has been extensively revised and updated with new maps and photos. If you want to know the fascinating story of how Madison got to be the way it is, this book belongs on your bookshelf. It will change the way you see the city and your role in it.

Only a fraction of what is known about Madison’s earliest African American settlers and the vibrant and cohesive communities they formed has been preserved in traditional sources. The rest is contained in the hearts and minds of their descendants. Seeing a pressing need to preserve these experiences, lifelong Madison resident Muriel Simms collected the stories of twenty-five African Americans whose families arrived, survived, and thrived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While some struggled to find work, housing, and acceptance, they describe a supportive and enterprising community that formed churches, businesses, and social clubs—and frequently came together in the face of adversity and conflict. A brief history of African American settlement in Madison begins the book to set the stage for the oral histories.

An electrifying and intensely involving history of the apocalyptic end of the antiwar movement, told through the story of the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and the man who masterminded it.

In the spring of 1968, the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) voted to remedialize the first semester of its required freshman composition course, English 101. The following year, it eliminated outright the second semester course, English 102. For the next quarter-century, UW had no real campus-wide writing requirement, putting it out of step with its peer institutions and preventing it from fully joining the "composition revolution" of the 1970s. Fleming shows how contributing factors--the growing reliance on TAs; the questioning of traditional curricula by young instructors and their students; the disinterest of faculty in teaching and administering general education courses--were part of a larger shift affecting universities nationally. He also connects the events of this period to the long, embattled history of freshman composition in the United States.

Maas offers a wickedly funny, inside look at what it was really like to be an ad woman on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and 1970s, from casual sex to professional serfdom, in this immensely entertaining and bittersweet memoir.