The Shattering
America in the 1960s
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- $45.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade whose conflicts shattered America’s postwar order and divide us still.
On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, social violence, and the blowback of a “silent majority” shredded the American fabric.
Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period’s fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam war unfolds as Cold War policy, high-stakes politics buffeted by powerful popular movements, and searing in-country experience. Americans’ challenges to government regulation of sexuality yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion.
Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism.
The Shattering illuminates currents that still run through our politics. It is a history for our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's fragile post-WWII consensus foundered on the shoals of racial conflict, war, and the sexual revolution, according to this insightful study. Northwestern University historian Boyle (Arc of Justice) focuses on three themes in this loosely chronological narrative of the 1960s through 1972. The grandest is the civil rights movement's demolition of Jim Crow and segregation—in Boyle's telling, it's an epic of dogged organizing and courageous showdowns with racist violence that ultimately bogged down in white backlash against forced busing to integrate schools. The second is the Vietnam War, which destroyed Lyndon Johnson's presidency and splintered Cold War liberalism into an enduring political and countercultural rift between left and right. The third is the establishment of a constitutional right to privacy in court cases legalizing birth control and abortion, which became a main front in the struggle between feminists and religious conservatives. Boyle's elegantly written account weaves together evolving currents of activism, mainstream politics, and public opinion with vignettes of ordinary people's lives and vivid profiles of Martin Luther King Jr., segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, and lesser-known figures such as civil rights organizer Ella Baker and Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in Roe v. Wade. The result is a skillful encapsulation of an era that brought to a boil conflicts still tormenting American society today. Photos.
