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

Hodgson, Godfrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691122881 ISBN 13: 9780691122885

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2005

Synopsis

America in Our Time is 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"It simply gets right, without great fuss, the detail and proportion of things like the civil rights movement, student unrest, the stages of our Vietnam engagement."

-- Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books

"A critique so stimulating and compelling that I can only say read it." -- Richard R. Lingeman, The New York Times

"Something has changed the world; and it has become very much the point to describe it. That is the work at which Hodgson has gone about here; and his way of going about it is an admirable one indeed."

-- Murray Kempton, front page, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Godfrey Hodgson is Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, where he was the director of the Reuters Foundation Programme for eight years. He is the author of numerous books, including More Equal Than Others (Princeton). Hodgson is a former foreign correspondent for British newspapers and a television anchor for British news services who has worked in forty-eight of the fifty states.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0691122881
• ISBN 13: 9780691122885
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608