The sixties and the end of modern America

The Sixties and the End of Modern America is a history of the period when, the author argues, the modern age in the United States yielded to the postmodern age. The great strengths that had led America to that point, based on industrial capitalism and mass production, and that had allowed a vigorous optimism to flourish, gave way to something more complex and contradictory. Our contemporary world of rapid deindustrialization, suburbanization, and a triumphant, highly adaptable consumer culture has many of its roots in the sixties. This book gives an account of the period that neither demonizes nor sanctifies a still highly controversial decade, but aims instead to arrive at a clear understanding of the enormous gulf that lies between presixties and postsixties America and how this came about.