Reframing 1968: American Politics, Protest and Identity - Paperback

by Martin Halliwell (Editor), Nick Witham (Editor)

The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. Gay rights, women's rights and civil rights. The Black Panthers and the Vietnam War. The New Left and the New Right. 1968 was a tumultuous year for US politics.
50 years on, Reframing 1968 explores the historical, political and social legacy of 1968 in modern protest movements. 14 interdisciplinary essays look at how protest has changed in the US, from Students for a Democratic Society and the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, to the Women's Movement in the 1970s, through to the contemporary visibility of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.

Front Jacket

An essential fifty-year retrospective of 1968 as a defining moment in activism and radical politics 'Few years have so stirred, divided, and haunted America as 1968: a war gone horribly wrong, revered leaders assassinated, ghettoes on fire, social movements oscillating wildly between hope and despair. The contributors to this stellar collection both recreate the intensity of that moment and incisively assess its significance for all that has happened since. Deeply probing, unsettling, and illuminating.' Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History, University of Cambridge In 1968, a series of local, national and global upheavals coalesced to produce some of the most consequential protest movements in the history of the United States. By examining the impact of 1968 on the shape of American politics, culture and identity, this volume offers a major fiftieth-anniversary retrospective of this watershed year for activism and radical politics. Reframing 1968 brings together a collection of new interdisciplinary essays by leading historians that focus on questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, war, democracy, urban demonstrations, campus radicalism, and the culture of protest. Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies in the Centre for American Studies and School of Arts at the University of Leicester. Nick Witham is Lecturer in US Political History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Cover image and design: www.richardbudddesign.co.uk

Author Biography

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. His authored books include Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970-2000 (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970 (Rutgers University Press, 2013), American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Transatlantic Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

Nick Witham is Lecturer in US Political History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is a historian of the twentieth-century United States with a focus on the politics and culture of protest and dissent since the 1960s. He is the author of The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2015).