America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon--what Happened and why

Godfrey Hodgson

Princeton University Press, 2005 - History - 590 pages

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.

Contents

• Hyperion: 3
• The 1940s: 17
• Abundance: 48
• PART II: 65
• The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus: 67
• The Presidency: 99
• The Establishment: 111
• The Media: 134
• The Crisis: 153
• Black Uprising: 179
• Black Separatism: 200
• Vietnam the Beginning: 225
• Economic Consequences: 244
• PART III: 261
• Fragmented Consensus: 263
• The Great Schism: 274
• Telegraph Avenue Son of Madison Avenue: 288
• An Invasion of Centaurs: 306
• Triumph and Failure of a Cultural Revolution: 326
• The End of Consensus: 353
• The Discovery of Middle America: 365
• War Peace and Two Americas: 384
• PART IV: 399
• More Movements than Movement: 401
• The Capture of the New Majority: 412
• No Crystal Stair: 429
• Ideology and Consensus: 463
• Puzzled and Prospering: 491
• NOTES ON SOURCES: 501
• AFTERWORD TO THE PRINCETON EDITION: 537
• INDEX: 563

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon--what Happened and why
• Author: Godfrey Hodgson
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2005
• ISBN: 0691122881, 9780691122885
• Length: 590 pages
• Subjects: History / Modern / 20th Century / General; History / United States / 20th Century; History / United States / General