Grand Expectations - The United States, 1945-1974 (Broché)

In Grand Expectations, James T. Patterson has written a highly readable and balanced work that weaves the major political, cultural, and economic events of the period into a superb portrait of America from 1945 through Watergate. Here is an era teeming with memorable events - from the bloody campaigns in Korea and the bitterness surrounding McCarthyism to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, to the Vietnam War and Nixon's resignation in 1974.
Patterson excels at portraying the amazing growth after World War II as well as the resultant buoyancy of spirit. And he shows how this upbeat, can-do mood spurred grander and grander expectations as the era progressed. Of course, not all Americans shared in this economic growth, and an important thread running through the book is an informed and gripping depiction of the civil rights movement - from the electrifying Brown v.
Board of Education decision, to the violent confrontations in Little Rock, Birmingham, and Selma, to the landmark civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Patterson also shows how the Vietnam War and a growing rights revolution triggered a backlash. And by Nixon's resignation, we find a national mood in contrast to the grand expectations of ten years earlier, one in which faith in our leaders and in the attainability of the American dream was becoming shaken.
Grand Expectations is a brilliant summation of the years that created the America that we know today, a time of setbacks amid unmatched and lasting achievements.