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On 4 July 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighbourhood 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" mobilised 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.
About the author
Kevin Boyle is the author of Arc of Justice, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Summary
From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade that exploded America’s postwar order.
