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| America in the Sixties
ISBN: 9780815651338
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Syracuse University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Nineteen sixties.; Counterculture; Vietnam War 1961-1975; Feminism; Civil rights movements; Social movements;
With a vexingly complicated start steeped in presidential history that lauds Eisenhower and dispels the "Kennedy Myth," Greene steamrollers into a fastidiously detailed but brisk names-and-places timeline of the Civil Rights movement, with the occasional fly-on-the-wall observation helping to break the monotony. Some of his historical discussions read like thinly-veiled commentary on current problem-solving, however, and he takes too long to break free of standard textbook content. Knowing his target audience, Greene finally takes a hard left to deliver on the his promise (a "readable, concise, and scholarly" approach "that attempts to meet the needs of both student and instructor alike"), providing a page-turning narrative of student unrest, feminism, constitutional rights, and the Vietnam War, interwoven with analyses of class stratification, emerging social ideology, and the shifting media culture. Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" nearly whispers into the readers' ears. But after exposing Nixon's dirty underbelly and paying a cliched homage to pop culture, Greene abruptly wraps things up. And several topics that are now critical (the environment, education, immigration) are here only modestly grazed. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
John Robert Greene is the Paul J. Schupf Professor of History and Humanities at Cazenovia College. He has written or edited seventeen books including The Limits of Power: The Nixon and Ford Administrations and The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. He is a regular commentator in the national media, having appeared on such forums as MSNBC, National Public Radio, C-SPAN, and the History Channel. |
