The Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest

No other decade of the 20th century has acquired the mythological status of the 1960s. For the United States this was the decade of the Camelot presidency of John F. Kennedy and the ruined presidency of Lyndon Johnson, of the great civil rights March on Washington and the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was the decade of the escalating war in Vietnam and the thrusting youth and peace movements, of urban riots and violent confrontations on the street. These years also witnessed the birth of the New Left on the one hand and the angry conservatism of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace on the other, as well as a determined political activism that ranged from the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan to the demonstrations of a revived women’s movement. This text introduces the reader to the major changes whch governed life in the sixties. The book examines the 1960s in the context of a decade caught between one America and another - a country which saw the move from an industrial to post-industrial economy and a parallel political change with the collapse of the New Deal political order and the transition to a divided system of politics.