America in White, Black, and Gray: A History of the Stormy 1960s

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From the reviews of Nazi Germany

"The best one-volume history of the Third Reich available.It fills a void which has existed for a long time and it will probably become the basic text for generations of students."Walter Laqueur

"An indispensable, compellingly readable political, military and social history of the Third Reich."Publishers Weekly

From the reviews of History of an Obsession

"This is truly a significant work, for Fischer gives a balanced account of a complex subject, making it painfully clear just how Germany became capable of genocide." Booklist

"Fischer writes with a clear mastery of both primary and secondary sources. Synthesizing a wide spectrum of literature into a fine, scholarly work." Library Journal

No decade since the end of World War II has been as seminal in its historical significance as the 1960s. That stormy period unleashed a host of pent-up social and generational conflicts that had not been experienced since the Civil War: intense racial and ethnic strife, cold war terror, the Vietnam War, counter-cultural protests, controversial social engineering, and political rancor.

Numerous studies on various aspects of these issues have been written over the past 35 years, but few have so successfully integrated the many-sided components into a coherent, synthetic, and reliable book that combines good storytelling with sound scholarly analysis. The main materials covered will be the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies; the Civil Rights movement; the Vietnam War and the protest it generated; the New Left, student radicals, and Black student militancy; and, finally, the counter-cultural side of the 60s: hippies, sex and Rock n' Roll.

Reviews

"This is an extraordinary book for two reasons, which are connected. One is the unique perspective of its author. The other, to some extent a consequence of the former, is the result: an important contribution to recent American history that ought not to be ignored by historians and that ought to be read by many Americans for the sake of their enlightenment." John Lukacs, author of Five Days in London and The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler -- John Lukacs
"Klaus Fischer's book on American culture in the 1960s is the best book ever written on the decade that revolutionized life in the United States. Illuminating every aspect of the Sixties from presidential politics to rock 'n' roll, Fischer achieves a balance of the pros and cons of the period that no other writer has been able to maintain. Here is just about everything you need to know about the decade, presented clearly and provocatively by a writer with a sharp eye for both the details and the big picture. From now on, no one will be able to talk or write knowledgably about the Sixties without taking Fischer's book into account." Jeffrey B. Russell, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara -- Jeffrey B. Russell
"This is a rare work that weaves scholarly, historical analysis with personal perspective and storytelling of the turbulent 1960s. Klaus Fischer brings a different insight to the topic because of his perspective as a 1959 teenagedmigrfrom Germany as well as his viewpoint as a cultural historian and scholar with a vested interest in his new country...Fischer provides a very balanced view of all three presidencies of the 1960s, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses and how they were manifested. He discusses at length how the personalities and policies of these presidents led to the formation of protests for change in the areas of civil, ethnic, and gender rights. He argues that the reason the nation has survived the events of the 1960s is because the people could draw on two hundred years of democratic experience in order to resolve these conflicts. He believes, however, that American democracy has been weakened because it has not been able to provide long-term solutions to these problems. The strength of this book is that Fischer does not focus on one or two areas (politics, economics, religion, etc.) to explain the events of the decade. Rather he uses his training and background as a cultural historian to paint a "big picture" that synthesizes the many different forces at work during the decade...The book concludes with an excellent discussion of how the events of the 1960s are having a profound effect on our lives three decades later and it provides the reader with ample resources for further study." -The Historian -- The Historian
"The book is based on secondary sources, and there are too many errors."-Terry Anderson, The Historian, Vol. 70 No. 4, 2009

Author Bio

Klaus Fischer is a cultural historian of Modern Europe with expertise in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Born in Germany in 1942, he arrived in the United States in 1959 as a 17-year-old emigrant. He attended Arizona State University and then the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD in 1972. He is the author of Nazi Germany: A New History and The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust.