The World the Sixties Made

How can we make sense of the fact that after decades of right-wing political mobilizing the major social changes wrought by the Sixties are more than ever part of American life? The World the Sixties Made, the first academic collection to treat the last quarter of the twentieth century as a distinct period of U.S. history, rebuts popular accounts that emphasize a conservative ascendancy.The essays in this volume survey a vast historical terrain to tease out the meaning of the not-so-long ago. They trace the ways in which recent U.S. culture and politics continue to be shaped by the legacy of the New Left's social movements, from feminism to gay liberation to black power. Together these essays demonstrate that the America that emerged in the 1970s was a nation profoundly, even radically democratized. Author note: Van Gosse is Assistant Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College; he is the author of Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left.Richard Moser is a National Field Representative of the American Association of University Professors and the author of The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era.