Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties Book

W.J. Rorabaugh offers a social history of the early 1960s through the lens of John F. Kennedy's presidential career. JFK, writes Rorabaugh, "was both a unique figure and a true representative of his times." He governed during the bleakest years of the Cold War, which coincided with the emergence of the civil rights movement, the rise of feminist ambition, and, through the Beats, the invention of postmodernism. The myth of Camelot has led many Americans to believe that these were a final few idyllic years before the disastrous arrival of political assassinations, urban riots, and failure in Vietnam, but Rorabaugh shows how these explosive developments all had roots in social commotion taking place less visibly under Kennedy's watch. Americans may have been "hooked on hope" during these years, Rorabaugh writes, but they were also setting themselves up for a hard fall: "A general mood of optimism is necessary to launch any period of reform, but the prevalence to that very mood causes reformers to push for changes that go well beyond the society's capacity for change in a short period of time." It is impossible to understand modern America without understanding what happened during this period, and Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties is an excellent introduction to it. --John J. MillerRead More

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  • Book Description

    The book explores life in America during that brief promising moment in the early Sixties when John F. Kennedy was president. Cold War frustrations and nuclear disaster worried Americans. The civil rights movement gained momentum. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a spokesman for nonviolent social change. The American family evolved. Friedan began the Women's Movement. Beat authors Kerouac and Ginsberg, folksingers Baez and Dylan, and Pop artists Lichtenstein and Warhol joined the cultural scene. Here was a period of marked political, social and cultural change. The old was swept away, and the country that the United States became began to be born.

  • Product Description

    This book explores life in America during that brief promising period in the early sixties when John F. Kennedy was the U.S. president. Kennedy's optimism and charm helped to give promise to the times. At the same time, Cold War frustrations in Cuba and Vietnam worried Americans, while the 1962 Missile Crisis narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster. Early in the decade, the Civil Rights movement gained momentum through student sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a powerful spokesman for non-violent social change and gave his powerful "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. The Civil Rights movement proved to be the seedbed for many other movements in the decade. The American family was also undergoing rapid change and Betty Friedan launched what became the Women's Movement in 1963. Culture, too, underwent transformation. The Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg gained respectability, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan revived folk music, and Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol produced Pop Art. Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey began to promote psychedelic drugs. The Sixties was a decade of marked political, social, and cultural change. Since 1976 W.J. Rorabaugh has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of The Alcoholic republic (Oxford, 1979), The Craft Apprentice (Oxford, 1986), and Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford, 1989). Professor Rorabaugh has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, and the John F. Kennedy Library. He has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Early Republic and the History of Education Quarterly.

  • 0521816173
  • 9780521816175
  • W. J. Rorabaugh
  • 16 September 2002
  • Cambridge University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 342
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