The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America

How can we make sense of the fact that after decades of right-wing political mobilizing the major social changes wrought by the Sixties are more than ever part of American life? The World the Sixties Made, the first academic collection to treat the last quarter of the twentieth century as a distinct period of U.S. history, rebuts popular accounts that emphasize a conservative ascendancy.

The essays in this volume survey a vast historical terrain to tease out the meaning of the not-so-long ago. They trace the ways in which recent U.S. culture and politics continue to be shaped by the legacy of the New Left's social movements, from feminism to gay liberation to black power. Together these essays demonstrate that the America that emerged in the 1970s was a nation profoundly, even radically democratized.
Review
"An important volume, The World The Sixties Made fills a large niche in post-1968 historical scholarship. Gosse's introductory essay is excellent, compelling, and well argued. Moser's introduction is a key piece and a timely historical document. This will be a significant and influential book." –Brad Martin, History and Social Sciences Department, Bryant College "The continued relevance of the left of the 1960s is a major challenge to almost any contemporary understanding of that tumultuous decade. This is a very inventive contribution, arguing that the left remains far more important than often claimed. There is a lot of new and intriguing research here. It's a book well worth reading." –Ken Cmiel, University of Iowa "In this historical moment, when the forces of reason seem so strong, The World the Sixties Made reminds us just how much the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s accomplished–and that the future is not closed." –James William Gibson, author of The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam and Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America