"Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector...

Cool'. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. 'The Origins of Cool in Postwar America' uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion,...

The 1940s are the watershed decade of the twentieth century, a time of trauma and upheaval but also of innovation and profound and lasting cultural change. This is the era of Fat Man and Little Boy, of FDR and Stalin, but also of Casablanca and Citizen Kane, zoot suits and Christian Dior, Duke Ellington and Edith Piaf. The 1940s were when The New Yorker came of age. A magazine that was best known for its humor and wry social observation would extend...

Charles Kuralt found everyone interesting. Beginning in 1967, he and his small CBS television crew crisscrossed the nation in a motor home, avoiding the interstates to meet the ordinary people on America's back roads. First aired on The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite, the resulting vignettes became a beloved touchstone of American culture for more than 20 years.

Discusses the political, economic, and cultural life of one of the pivotal decades of the twentieth century, a period of transition and crisis for the nation and for its citizens.

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelist When Tom Wolfe smashed his way into the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his second book, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The Pump House Gang is the result: a collection of essays that chronicles...