And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s / Edition 2

by David Chalmers

Overview

Updated and revised, this is the best short interpretive history of the U.S. in the 1960s.

David Chalmers's widely acclaimed overview of the 1960s describes how the civil rights movement touched off a growing challenge to traditional values and arrangements. Chalmers recounts the judicial revolution that set national standards for race, politics, policing, and privacy. He examines the long, losing war on poverty and the struggle between the media and the government over the war in Vietnam. He follows feminism's "second wave" and the emergence of the environmental, consumer, and citizen action movements. He also explores the worlds of rock, sex, and drugs, and the entwining of the youth culture, the counterculture, and the American marketplace.

This newly revised edition covers the conservative counter-revolution and cultural wars. It carries the legacy of the 1960s forward: from Tom Hayden’s idealistic 1962 Port Huron Statement through Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America” and Grover Norquist’s twenty-first century “Tax Payer’s Protection Pledge.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421408224
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2013
Series:	The American Moment
Edition description:	second edition, updated
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

During the 1960s, David Chalmers was Fulbright Professor at the Universities of Sri Lanka, Tokyo, and the Philippines and lectured in Vietnam and Korea. He went to jail in St. Augustine with Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a history of the Ku Klux Klan entitled Hooded Americanism, and worked for President Johnson's U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He is Distinguished Service Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Florida.

Table of Contents

Editor's Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

1 Coming Out of the 1950s 1

2 Marching in the Streets 17

3 Through the Halls of Government 35

4 Poverty and Progress 55

5 Revolt on the Campus 68

6 The Counterculture 88

7 President's War, Media War 101

8 The Antiwar Movement 118

9 The End of Optimism 135

10 Toward the Liberation of Women 146

11 Legacies and Continuities 168

Select Further Readings 195

Index 199

What People are Saying About This

David J. Garrow

Marvelously comprehensive and superbly written. An exceptionally valuable overview of the 1960s, replete with astute interpretations and commentary.

— David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Dan T. Carter

With its hint of passion and irony the title of David Chalmers' book aptly captures the complexities of his study. Beautifully written, it is more than a recitation of the actors and events of the 1960s. It helps us to make sense of the decade.

— Dan T. Carter, Emory University

From the Publisher

With its hint of passion and irony, the title of David Chalmers's book aptly captures the complexities of his study. Beautifully written, it is more than a recitation of the actors and events of the 1960s. It helps us to make sense of the decade.
—Dan T. Carter, Emory University

Marvelously comprehensive and superbly written. An exceptionally valuable overview of the 1960s, replete with astute interpretations and commentary.
—David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Editorial Reviews

The dominant interpretation of 1960s America is expressed in titles of two leading histories of the decade: William O'Neill's Coming Apart ( LJ 7/71) and Allen Matusow's The Unraveling of America ( LJ 12/1/83). Now a more sanguine assessment is offered by Chalmers, who places greater emphasis upon positive legacies such as an altered national consciousness regarding women, race, and poverty, and an increase in citizen action. Yet his book is not a celebration of the Sixties, and in fact is less an attempt at new interpretation than at synthesis. Essentially a survey, the book's strength is a long bibliographical essay and close attention throughout the text to key writings. It will be useful as an undergraduate resource. Because O'Neill and Matusow both achieve stronger narratives, their books remain better choices for most public libraries.-- Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.

Library Journal

A history of architecture driven by the ideas behind the buildings defining architectural styles from the Greeks to the present with an intellectual flair. The 15 contributing historians and architects develop the political themes of Versailles, the power and glory of medieval architecture, the industrial revolution and Hegelian philosophy in relation to modern architecture, and specific studies of Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Rossi, and Rob Krier. Avoiding the encyclopedic approach, the volume excavates deeper into the foundations of architectural history. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Chalmers accounts for much of the recent past in a short history that is both eloquent and full. This volume is without peer in focusing on the American sixties with evenhandedness.

Journal of Southern History