Grand Expectations: The United States, 19451974 (Oxford History of the United States),New

Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quartercentury of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 62 percent of the oil, 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had threefourths of the world's gold supplies. English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the postWar era enjoyed 'the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.' It was a boom that produced a national euphoria, a buoyant time of grand expectations and an unprecedented faith in our government, in our leaders, and in the American dreaman optimistic spirit which would be shaken by events in the '60s and '70s, and particularly by the Vietnam War.Now, in Grand Expectations, James T. Patterson has written a magisterial 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 eventsfrom the bloody campaigns in Korea and the bitterness surrounding McCarthyism to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, to the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Nixon's resignation. Patterson excels at portraying the amazing growth after World War IIthe great building boom epitomized by Levittown (the largest such development in history) and the baby boom (which exploded literally nine months after VJ Day)as well as the resultant buoyancy of spirit reflected in everything from streamlined toasters, to big, flashy cars, to the soaring, butterfly roof of TWA's airline terminal in New York. And he shows how this upbeat, cando 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 movementfrom 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 Warwhich provoked LBJ's growing credibility gap, vast defense spending that dangerously unsettled the economy, and increasingly angry protestsand a growing rights revolution (including demands by women, Hispanics, the poor, Native Americans, and gays) triggered a backlash that widened hidden rifts in our society, rifts that divided along racial, class, and generational lines. And by Nixon's resignation, we find a national mood in stark 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 greatly shaken.Grand Expectations is the newest volume in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States. The earlier releases were highly acclaimed, and one, Battle Cry of Freedom, was both a New York Times bestseller and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Patterson's volume takes its rightful place beside these distinguished works. It is a brilliant summation of the years that created the America that we know today, a time of unmatched achievements and devastating tragedies.