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Cold War America

Dr. Roger Fagge H.339

 

General reading:

William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (1995)

John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-60 (1988)

Geoffrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (1976).

 

1.) The Anticommunist Crusade: The politics of anticommunism; social and cultural consequences; anticommunism, at home and abroad, after McCarthy.

David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (1978)

Richard M. Fried, The Russians are coming ! The Russians are coming ! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (1998)

M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935-1965 (1998)

Arthur Miller, Timebends (1987)

Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents (2002 edn.)

 

 

2.) The Affluent Society: economic growth; social conformity; the culture of consumerism; faultlines from the mid 1960s

Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in Fifties America (1992)

J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1984)

Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners (1967)

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American families in the Cold War Era (1990)

William Whyte, The Organisation Man (1956)

 

3.) Reformers, Dissenters and Revolutionaries: communism in the 1950s; the Beat Generation; Civil Rights, the New Left and the Counterculture; the end of Liberal America.

James Campbell, This is the Beat Generation (1999)

Robert Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty (1997)

Gunter Lewy, The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life (1990)

Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984)

James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987)

David Farber, The Sixties: From Memory to History (1994)

 

For further reading see the reading lists for AM211 Reform, Revolt and Reaction in the US, 1932-75, and AM401 From McCarthy to Elvis: America in the Fifties, both available online at the department website.