Making Peace with the 60s

(Paperback)

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David Burner's panoramic history of the 1960s conveys the ferocity of debate and the testing of visionary hopes that still require us to make sense of the decade. He begins with the civil rights and black power movements and then turns to nuanced descriptions of Kennedy and the Cold War, the counterculture and its antecedents in the Beat Generation, the student rebellion, the poverty wars, and the liberals' war in Vietnam. As he considers each topic, Burner advances a provocative argument about how liberalism self-destructed in the 1960s. In his view, the civil rights movement took a wrong turn as it came to emphasize the "identity politics" of race and ethnicity at the expense of the vastly more important politics of class and distribution of wealth.

Reviews

"A thoughtful, almost elegiac, examination of liberalism's moral and ideological collapse over ten famously tumultuous years... The book is lucid, and Burner's tone throughout is as measured and reasonable as the creed whose redemption he seeks... a valuable contribution for those still trying to make sense of the '60s."--Kirkus Reviews "A sane, reasoned, civil book on the 1960s by a liberal academic: Who says the age of miracles is over ... Making Peace with the 60s is a fine book."--Philip Gold, Washington Times "Burner has mastered the large volume of recent historical writing on the period, has thought carefully about the major issues, and makes some fascinating connections among the civil rights movement, the Beats, and the student rebellions in the middle of the decade... Burner is balanced and fair-minded, especially on such controversial topics as the origins of black power, the social contributions of the Great Society, and the political mistakes of liberalism during the Kennedy and Johnson years."--Lewis L. Gould, Book World "Burner offers a keen-sighted, comprehensive analysis of a fascinating era... Readers searching for an admirable explanation of the cross-connections in this mythic decade can find them here."--Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

David Burner is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of John F. Kennedy and a New Generation, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life, and The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918-1932.