A Companion to Post-1945 America

by Agnew, Jean-Christophe; Rosenzweig, Roy

• ISBN13: 9781405149846
• ISBN10: 1405149841
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-23
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

A Companion to Post-1945 America is an original collection of twenty-six essays by key scholars on the history and historiography of the period. As the twenty-first century begins, post-World War II scholarship joins the historical canon with a wealth of new material. The contributors to this volume are the most prominent scholars in their respective fields, and each essay analyzes and categorizes the historical literature of the post-1945 period over a wide variety of topics. The coverage includes family, the media, ethnicity, labor, social movements, politics, and foreign policy. Each essay contains a select bibliography to guide further research, and the volume includes a review section that focuses on eight popular and influential historical works. For students, historians, and general readers of modern American history, this book is a milestone that will set the standard for post-World War II American historiography.

Author Biography

Jean-Christophe Agnew is Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. He is the author of Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought (1989) and of a number of articles on the history of market society and consumer culture.

Roy Rosenzweig is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books, including The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), which won the Historic Preservation Book Prize for Best Book of 1998.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
About the Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiii
Society and Culture	p. 1
Family and Demography in Postwar America: A Hazard of New Fortunes?	p. 3
The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis	p. 20
American Religion Since 1945	p. 44
Time Out: Leisure and Tourism	p. 64
Mass Media: From 1945 to the Present	p. 78
What the Traffic Bares: Popular Music "Back in the USA"	p. 96
The Visual Arts in Post-1945 America	p. 113
American Intellectual History and Social Thought Since 1945	p. 134
People and Movements	p. 153
American Political Culture Since 1945	p. 155
Hyphen Nation: Ethnicity in American Intellectual and Political Life	p. 175
Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945	p. 192
The Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality Since 1945	p. 211
Postwar Women's History: The "Second Wave" or the End of the Family Wage?	p. 235
Sexuality and the Movements for Sexual Liberation	p. 260
A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left	p. 277
The Triumph of Conservatives in a Liberal Age	p. 303
Modern Environmentalism	p. 328
Politics and Foreign Policy	p. 343
Beyond the Presidential Synthesis: Reordering Political Time	p. 345
McCarthyism and the Red Scare	p. 371
The Politics of "The Least Dangerous Branch": The Court, the Constitution, and Constitutional Politics Since 1945	p. 385
The Cold War in Europe	p. 406
Off the Beach: The United States, Latin America, and the Cold War	p. 426
The United States and East Asia in the Postwar Era	p. 446
Washington Quagmire: US Presidents and the Vietnam Wars - A Pattern of Intervention	p. 464
The End of the Cold War	p. 479
From the "Atomic Age" to the "Anti-Nuclear Age": Nuclear Energy in Politics, Diplomacy, and Culture	p. 501
Essential Reading	p. 519
J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985)	p. 521
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom (1995)	p. 525
Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (1952, 1956, 1965)	p. 529
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (1992)	p. 534
Alphonso Pinkney, The Myth of Black Progress (1984)	p. 537
Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970)	p. 540
Victor Navasky, Naming Names (1980)	p. 545
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)	p. 550
Index	p. 557
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