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Book

The shattering : America in the 1960s

Call Number

  • 973.923 B7924 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]

Physical Description

xv, 456 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Summary

"From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade that exploded America's postwar order. On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a 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, rioting, and the blowback of a "silent majority" mobilized by an emerging right, left a fragmented political landscape. Kevin Boyle's full-dimensioned history of the decade is authoritative and engrossing. The civil rights movement emerges from the grassroots activism of Montgomery, through the tragic violence of Birmingham, to the frustrations of King's Chicago campaign and a rising Black nationalism. The Vietnam war unfolds as misguided policy, high-stakes politics, and searing in-country experience. Women's challenges of gender norms yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, contraception, and abortion. With empathy its keynote, this definitive history of the 1960s recovers the humanity behind the decade's divisions"--

Contents

  • Eddy street
  • Twilight wars
  • The beloved community
  • The dead
  • Bending
  • The revolutions of 1965
  • Turning and turning
  • Waist deep in the big muddy
  • The cruelest months
  • Nobodies
  • Coming home.

Subjects