This is America? - by R Monhollon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Communities across America were thrown into upheaval during the 1960s, when thousands of young people began to publicly question the status quo, particularly in terms of race, youth, and gender. As grassroots social movements sprung up on college campuses (and often spread to surrounding towns) where participants debated race, the role of government, Vietnam, feminism, the Cold War, and other issues of the day, Americans that supported the status quo joined forces to oppose the activists and lend their own voices to the debate on the meaning of citizenship and patriotism. Monhollon uncovers the voices of ordinary people on all sides of the political spectrum in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas, and reveals how Americans from a range of ideological and political perspectives responded to and tried to resolve political and social conflict in the 1960s.

Review Quotes

'Rusty Monhollon provides a useful corrective to the by-now traditional Berkeley/Upper West Side of New York-centric narratives of the 1960s. Dissent and discord shook middle America in those years, just as they did the better known centers of student activism and racial militancy on the two coasts. But it's not just the regional angle that makes this book so interesting. In this dark-hued account we encounter a wide range of fallible human beings, political actors on the left and the right, whites and blacks, young and old.' - Maurice Isserman, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History, Hamilton College, and co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

'This Is America? offers us the fullest picture we have of how the Sixties happened proving that it really did happen in the vast stretches of the American prairie. Perhaps its signal achievement is to affirm how much a part of the American mainstream Goldwater-Wallace style conservatism was during the 1960s. This is a story of pitched conflict in the heartland, told sympathetically yet dispassionately.' - Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America

'An extensively researched, in-depth account of the 1960s as they played out in one town in the heartland of America. Monhollon brings to light the sentiments of ordinary citizens across the political spectrum.' - Tom Wells, author of The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam andWild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg

'...illuminate[s] in important ways a major part of recent US history.' - K Blaser, Choice

'Monhollon reminds us that the 1960s happened with great ferocity in places other than the Deep South and Berkeley, California.' - Chicago Tribune

About the Author

RUSTY L. MONHOLLON is Assistant Professor of History at Hood College.