America in Our Time : From World War II to Nixon--What Happened and Why

by Hodgson, Godfrey; Hodgson, Godfrey (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9780691122885
• ISBN10: 0691122881
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-06
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

America in Our Timeis a history of the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the fall of Richard Nixon. Focusing on the 1960s, the book debunks some of the myths about that much misremembered decade. Godfrey Hodgson pioneers the idea that in the 1950s a "liberal consensus" governed American politics, by which conservatives accepted the liberal domestic policy of the welfare state, while all but a few liberals shared the conservative foreign policy of Cold War "containment." The book shows in rich detail how that consensus was shattered by the converging blows of racial upheaval, the Vietnam War, and a pervasive crisis of authority in American society, all the way from the family to the White House, opening the way for a new conservatism. Hodgson has added an afterword that looks back at the events covered in the book from the perspective of almost thirty years since it was published.

Author Biography

Godfrey Hodgson is Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

Hyperion	p. 3
The 1940s	p. 17
Abundance	p. 48
The ideology of the liberal consensus	p. 67
The presidency	p. 99
The establishment	p. 111
The media	p. 134
The crisis	p. 153
Black uprising	p. 179
Black separatism	p. 200
Vietnam : the beginning	p. 225
Economic consequences	p. 244
Fragmented consensus	p. 263
The great schism	p. 274
Telegraph Avenue, son of Madison Avenue	p. 288
An invasion of centaurs	p. 306
Triumph and failure of a cultural revolution	p. 326
The end of consensus	p. 353
The discovery of middle America	p. 365
War, peace and two Americas	p. 384
More movements than movement	p. 401
The capture of the new majority	p. 412
No crystal stair	p. 429
Ideology and consensus	p. 463
Puzzled and prospering	p. 491
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