America's uncivil wars : the sixties era : from Elvis to the fall of Richard Nixon

Description

Here is a panoramic history of America from 1954 to 1973, ranging from the buoyant teen-age rebellion first captured by rock and roll, to the drawn-out and dispiriting endgame of Watergate. In America's Uncivil Wars, Mark Hamilton Lytle illuminates the great social, cultural, and political upheavals of the era. He begins his chronicle surprisingly early, in the late '50s and early '60s, when A-bomb protests and books ranging from Catcher in the Rye to Silent Spring and The Feminine Mystique challenged attitudes towards sexuality and the military-industrial complex. As baby boomers went off to college, drug use increased, women won more social freedom, and the widespread availability of birth control pills eased inhibitions against premarital sex. Lytle describes how in 1967 these isolated trends began to merge into the mainstream of American life. The counterculture spread across the nation, Black Power dominated the struggle for racial equality, and political activists mobilized vast numbers of dissidents against the war. It all came to a head in 1968, with the deepening morass of the war, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., race riots, widespread campus unrest, the violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon. By then, not only did Americans divide over race, class, and gender, but also over matters as simple as the length of a boy's hair or of a girl's skirt. Only in the aftermath of Watergate did the uncivil wars finally crawl to an end, leaving in their wake a new elite that better reflected the nation's social and cultural diversity. Blending a fast-paced narration with broad cultural analysis, America's Uncivil Wars offers an invigorating portrait of the most tumultuous and exciting time in modern American history Content: Preface Introduction PART ONE: THE ERA OF CONSENSUS, 1954-63 1. The Consensus 2. The Cultural Cold War 3. Cracks in the Consensus 4. The New Generation 5. The Cold War on the New Frontier 6. The Second Civil War PART TWO: THE SIXTIES, 1964-68 7. 1964: Welcome to the 1960s 8. Teach-in, Strike Out: The Uncivil Wars Heat Up 9. The Great Freak Forward 10. A Very Bad Year Begins 11. A Bad Year Gets Worse: The Domestic War Front PART THREE: THE RISE OF ESSENTIALIST POLITICS AND THE FALL OF RICHARD NIXON, 1969-74 12. The Rise of Gender and Identity Politics 13. Identities of Race and Ethnicity 14. Taking on the System 15. The Uncivil Wars: Woodstock to Kent State 16. Watergate: The Last Battle Epilogue: Who Won? Notes on Sources Index