Debating the 1960s - (Debating Twentieth-Century America) by Michael W Flamm & David Steigerwald (Paperback)

About the Book

Debating the 1960s explores the decade through the controversies between radicals, liberals, and conservatives. The focus is on four main areas of contention: social welfare, civil rights, foreign relations, and social order. The book also examines the emergence of the New Lef...

Book Synopsis

Debating the 1960s explores the decade through the controversies between radicals, liberals, and conservatives. The focus is on four main areas of contention: social welfare, civil rights, foreign relations, and social order. The book also examines the emergence of the New Left and the modern conservative movement. Combining analytical essays and historical documents, the book highlights the polarization of the era and assesses the enduring importance of the 1960s on contemporary American politics and society.

Review Quotes

Michael Flamm and David Steigerwald, two of the best historians of the Sixties era, have created a smart, provocative book that is perfect for the classroom. Combining state-of-the-art overviews with a rich selection of documents, Debating the 1960s pushes past the standard narrative of the 1960s and asks students to analyze the contesting forces of radicalism, liberalism and conservatism during that turbulent period.


This is a splendid survey of the three-cornered conflict that still shapes American politics and culture. It should be required reading in classrooms around the nation.

This is, in fact, an excellent tool for the undergraduate classroom. . . . The two essays are useful and clear. And the documents are important to the discussion of the period.

About the Author

Michael W. Flamm is associate professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is a scholar of modern U.S. political history with a research focus on the 1960s. He is the author of Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. He is currently researching and writing a book on the Harlem Riot of July 1964 entitled In the Heat of the Summer. David Steigerwald is associate professor of history at Ohio State University and teaches at the university's Marion Campus. Among his books is The Sixties and the End of Modern America. He is now finishing a book on American intellectuals and the affluent society.