Amazon.com Review
Part of the multivolume Oxford History of the United States, Grand Expectations spotlights the United States at the center of the international stage during the post World War II years. The book opens on country very different from the U.S. of today--racial segregation was law and more than half the nation's farm dwellings had no electricity. With England, Germany, and Japan ravaged by war, the U.S. entered a period of prosperity that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. Though Patterson ends his book with the downfall of Nixon and the beginnings of a troubled economy, he concludes that the U.S. in 1974, "remained one of the most stable societies in the world."
From Publishers Weekly
In a continuously challenging, stirring history of postwar America, Brown University history professor Patterson charts Americans' ever-widening postwar expectations about the capacity of the U.S. to create abundance and opportunity. Spurred by the civil rights movement's egalitarianism and idealism, many groups?including labor unions, feminists, Native and Hispanic Americans, farm organizations, the poor and the elderly?engaged in a "rights evolution" that peaked in the mid-1980s amid political backlash, economic stagnation and barriers of class and prejudice. A corollary theme is the souring of the widespread belief that the U.S. had the economic and military means to control the behavior of other nations. Bursting with shrewd analyses and fresh assessments of people and events (McCarthyism, the Beats, the growth of suburbia, Vietnam, etc.), Patterson's primarily political but also cultural and social history gores both liberal and conservative sacred cows. He blames John F. Kennedy's personal approach to foreign affairs for escalating tension with the Soviet Union. And he describes Nixon as "a very humorless, tightly controlled man" who set the FBI to destroy the Black Panthers and who "put in 12- to 16-hour days, in part because he was unable to delegate authority."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.