The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s

by David Farber and Beth L. Bailey

Book Overview

The 1960s continue to be the subject of passionate debate and political controversy, a touchstone in struggles over the meaning of the American past and the direction of the American future. Amid the polemics and the myths, making sense of the Sixties and its legacies presents a challenge. This book is for all those who want to take it on. Because there are so many facets to this unique and transformative era, this volume offers multiple approaches...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231113730
• ISBN13: 9780231113731
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive Purview Of the Fascinating 1960s!

Aging baby-boomers like myself can rest more easily; herein one discovers a wonderful effort, which succeeds marvelously in accurately and faithfully recounting and retelling the somewhat convoluted and always multi-currented tenor of the times for the 1960s. Given the massive neo-conservative effort to discredit the theoretical positions and social ethos of the sixties generation, it is terrific to have such a carefully researched and meticulously documented effort as is "The Columbia Guide To America In The 1960s" to give greater voice and renewed verve and credibility to the ideas and theoretical positions that arose from the ongoing new-left critique of mainstream society that emanated from the events of that storied decade. Authors David Farber and Beth Bailey are both academics with considerable expertise in the area of contemporary 20th century history, and this aplomb with the facts and the sense of the times is fascinating to plow through on both an intellectual and also an emotional level. This is scholarship well done! It does one well to remember that the sixties decade and what came out of it are both subjects of serious disagreements as well as continuing controversy, given the attempt by the right wing to define the ideas stemming from those times as bogus and discredited. Therefore, making sense of all that is brought back to the surface in this book represents a considerable effort, but it is hard to deny such an effort to make sense of a time with so many crosscurrents and so much social, cultural, and political turbulence is well worth the effort. Therefore, the book is organized around several different perspectives and approaches. In the first section, we are presented with a well-developed and intricately organized narrative that superbly covers the waterfront of the era's most significant events, policies, and changes. The second part of the book is organized around ten different essay efforts by well-regarded contemporary historians on various salient aspects of the decade, ranging from the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and of course, the war in Vietnam. The net effect of the combined first and second sections is to give us a much more comprehensive and detailed understanding of both the issues and events on the one hand, and how they fit into the mosaic of the sixties, on the other hand. Subsequent section also add to the overall contribution of the book, by giving us shorter essays on other aspects of the era, subjects of particualr interest to each of the authors, and a terrific extended bibliography for those of us interested in further exploring the eddies and currents of various aspects of the decade in question. It fairly well smashes revisionist interpretations of the era into smithereens by exposing them for the solipsistic efforts at refashioning the truth that they are, and does so while educating and entertaining us on an number of levels at one. This is a great book, and o