Pulitzer Prize winning author Irwin Unger provides a compelling narrative history of the American years from the end of World War Two to the 21st century. The text touches all the major topical bases-wars, economic growth, women, racial and life-style minorities, cultural trends, demographic evolution, and politics and diplomacy-while telling thestoryof America's history and places the themes within their chronological setting. Written to educate students in the broad trends, the text highlights how economic, demographic and cultural change affected all Americans rather than one specific group.This volume covers all aspects of American history since World War II including "Postwar America (1945-1952), the Eisenhower Era (1953-1960), the turbulent sixties, Vietnam, an era of malaise, the conservative tide and century's end (1993-2001).For history enthusiast and others interested in a broad-based narrative on American History since World War II.

The decades since World War II have, for good or ill, been momentous for the United States and for the American people. These were prosperous years. The United States pulled out of the greatest economic depression it ever faced and began a half century and more of steady and expanding prosperity. These were tolerant years. Between 1945 and the present, Americans ended legal racial segregation and, by and large, learned to live with groups, practices, and beliefs that were once disparaged or even banned. These were democratic years. Increasingly authority diffused from political parties, rigid hierarchies, and self-perpetuating elites to other groups and looser aggregations and associations. These were creative years. In painting, literature, and the popular arts in America became a cultural dynamo, respected and envied around the world. Yet even acknowledging all these advances, these were troubled and turbulent years as well. Especially in the 1960s the country was wracked with violence and torn by dissension. And these were also menacing years. For most of the last half of the twentieth-century Americans cowered under the threat of superpower collision and nuclear holocaust.These themes--along with others--provide the substance of this history. But the work is not structured thematically. I believe that history, as the word itself declares, is astorythat includes an opening and a development, if not always a satisfying final resolution. And so the work has a chronological framework. Most chapters represent chunks of time, and it is within each of these that the themes play out. This approach not only locks on to a basic human interest in narrative; it is also the best way, I believe, to understand the past.In any history, of course, it is human beings, their feelings, doings, and ideas, that are the ultimate substance. Impersonal, disembodied "forces" must not be neglected--but I do not believe that forces are enough to explain the events of history. People are not will-less objects, unable to influence events. I do not subscribe to the "great man" theory of historical causation. Even the most powerful and commanding figures are hedged in by the circumstances--material, ideological, political, and social--of their day. Yet they are rarely helpless against the currents of history. Given these views, the reader will not be surprised to find much attention given to biography and to the interplay of personality.It is a commonplace among thoughtful Americans, even today, to criticize texts for neglecting "outsiders." In fact this is seldom true any more, a change that reflects a revolution in attitudes since World War II. And it is certainly not true ofRecent America: The United States Since 1945.The work, rather, seeks to recount the progress of many groups in America once considered secondary players in the nation's story. The reader of Recent America will find extensive coverage of women, blacks, Latinos (Hispanics), immigrants, gays, dissenters, and men and women of traditional religious views. These Americans, obviously far more than half the total population, have rightly demanded that their voices be heard, their stories told. And they are told in this work-I hope with sensitivity and care. At the same time, however, I have sought to strike a balance. If those formerly outside now have enhanced access to power and wealth, traditional elites cannot be dismissed. They are still ensconced disproportionately in the seats of privilege and authority, and their views and doings are central to understanding the course of the nation and the society.This raises another matter: the place of politics. It is undoubtedly true that in the past scholars conflated history with politics. History, they believed, was merelypastpolitics. We no longer have so limited a view of history. Yet, in their rejection of the older perception, some recent historia