The Shattering: America in the 1960s

by Kevin Boyle

Overview

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade whose conflicts shattered America’s postwar order and divide us still.

On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident 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, social violence, and the blowback of a “silent majority” shredded the American fabric.

Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period’s fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam war unfolds as Cold War policy, high-stakes politics buffeted by powerful popular movements, and searing in-country experience. Americans’ challenges to government regulation of sexuality yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion.

Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism.

The Shattering illuminates currents that still run through our politics. It is a history for our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355994
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	239,102
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.50(d)

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.

Hometown:

Bexley, Ohio

Date of Birth:

October 7, 1960

Place of Birth:

Detroit, Michigan

Education:

B.A., University of Detroit, 1982; M.A., University of Michigan, 1984; Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1990

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Eddy Street 1

2 Twilight Wars 44

3 The Beloved Community 79

4 The Dead 118

5 Bending 138

6 The Revolutions of 1965 172

7 Turning and Turning 200

8 Waist Deep in the Big MUddy 233

9 The Cruelest Months 266

10 Nobodies 305

11 Coming Home 343

Epilogue 383

Acknowledgments 393

Note on Sources 399

Notes 413

Index 431

Illustrations follow pages 138 and 266

Editorial Reviews

07/05/2021

America’s fragile post-WWII consensus foundered on the shoals of racial conflict, war, and the sexual revolution, according to this insightful study. Northwestern University historian Boyle (Arc of Justice) focuses on three themes in this loosely chronological narrative of the 1960s through 1972. The grandest is the civil rights movement’s demolition of Jim Crow and segregation—in Boyle’s telling, it’s an epic of dogged organizing and courageous showdowns with racist violence that ultimately bogged down in white backlash against forced busing to integrate schools. The second is the Vietnam War, which destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and splintered Cold War liberalism into an enduring political and countercultural rift between left and right. The third is the establishment of a constitutional right to privacy in court cases legalizing birth control and abortion, which became a main front in the struggle between feminists and religious conservatives. Boyle’s elegantly written account weaves together evolving currents of activism, mainstream politics, and public opinion with vignettes of ordinary people’s lives and vivid profiles of Martin Luther King Jr., segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, and lesser-known figures such as civil rights organizer Ella Baker and Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade. The result is a skillful encapsulation of an era that brought to a boil conflicts still tormenting American society today. Photos. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A lively popular history of the 1960s…Boyle enlivens his narrative with emblematic vignettes."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Glenn C. Altschuler

"[A] rich, layered account of the 1960s."

New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

"We live in eventful times, but they can’t compare to the 1960s. Kevin Boyle has masterfully given sense and shape to a chaotic decade. The Shattering is panoramic, astute, and compellingly readable."

Nicholas Lemann

"The Shattering is a magnificent book, immensely rewarding on many levels. With elegant fluency and quiet command, Kevin Boyle probes deeply into the intertwined struggles of the 'long Sixties' and their meaning for us today."

Fredrik Logevall

"[A] luminous guide to a tumultuous decade…Boyle elegantly narrates the ‘60s through his three lenses—race, militarism, and sexuality—and grounds his narrative with individuals caught in the whirlwind."

New York Times Book Review - James A. Morone

"The Shattering is history at its absolute best. Boyle is such a gifted storyteller—I found myself riveted by this captivating portrait of a time when America exhibited its best and its worst natures side by side."

Alex Kotlowitz

"Gripping…Kevin Boyle gives us a fresh perspective on the central debates of the decade that will help readers understand the era in an entirely new light."

Elizabeth Hinton

"In his beautifully rendered The Shattering, Kevin Boyle returns us to those challenging years, peopling them with real characters both famous and ordinary."

Lizabeth Cohen

"The Shattering is an epic history of the 1960s for a new generation. This passionately narrated, luminously written account of the decade that forever transformed America brilliantly recounts how that era’s struggle for social justice and radical democracy continues to shape our own."

Peniel E. Joseph

★ 09/01/2021

This history of the 1960s United States by National Book Award winner Boyle (American history, Northwestern Univ.; Arc of Justice) begins with the story of a patriotic middle-class family in 1950s Chicago to set the stage for the tumultuous decade to follow. Boyle's cleverly written book covers (mostly chronologically) three broad subjects that played out between 1960 and 1972: first, the civil rights movement and activists who dealt with extreme violence and still managed to overturn Jim Crow laws; second, the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy and their effects on American youths; and third, government attempts to control sexuality and women's rights, plus two major rulings on abortion and birth control that started a battle between feminists and religious institutions that still resonates. Boyle dives deep into figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Alabama governor George Wallace and also profiles vitally important people who have been less often written about, including Ella Baker and Estelle Griswold. The book is enhanced by maps of U.S. military conflicts and photographs from the civil rights movement and other events. VERDICT Fans of Boyle's previous works and readers of books by Isabel Wilkerson and Jon Meachum will find exceptional research and powerful writing in this outstanding history.—Jason L. Steagall, Arapahoe Libs., Centennial, CO

Library Journal

★ 2021-08-24
A concise, beautifully written history of the “long” 1960s, bringing the most important events and developments of that tumultuous decade to vivid life.

Boyle, who won the National Book Award for Arc of Justice (2004), aims his latest at general readers intrigued by this pivotal period of U.S. history. However, it’s likely that those most affected by the text will be those who lived through the period; the author delivers a potent reminder of the unremitting, searing crises of those years. Assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate crisis are only the most significant. Other incidents and cultural changes weren’t far behind in impact: Woodstock, experimentations in drugs and sex, sit-ins and teach-ins, protest marches, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Roe v. Wade, the Pentagon Papers, etc. Boyle slights no major figures—Lyndon Johnson, Abbie Hoffman, the Beatles, Tom Hayden, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon get their due—while bringing in many lesser-known ones. Admitting to necessary selectivity, the author has to pass over many issues then just coming to prominence, including Latino and Native rights, the women’s movement, and the emerging environmental crisis. Boyle convincingly, if too subtly, contends that the “old order,” though undoubtedly under immense pressure from the outside, also “cracked from within.” Boyle is skilled at setting events in their particular context, although occasionally, as in the throat-clearing opening 60 pages on the years before 1960, he overdoes it. What makes the book particularly effective is the author’s inclusion of the lives and situations of ordinary Americans; Boyle’s memorable character sketches capture the hard realities and significant changes that occurred during that time. The author is also commendably balanced in his assessments; it’s difficult to discern his partialities. Ultimately, this is a standout example of narrative analytical history.

A brilliantly achieved history of some unusually fraught years of American history.

Kirkus Reviews