This Is America?

Communities across America were thrown into upheaval during the 1960s, when thousands of young people began to publicly question the status quo, particularly in terms of race, youth, and gender. As grassroots social movements sprung up on college campuses (and often spread to surrounding towns) where participants debated race, the role of government, Vietnam, feminism, the Cold War, and other issues of the day, Americans that supported the status quo joined forces to oppose the activists and lend their own voices to the debate on the meaning of citizenship and patriotism. Monhollon uncovers the voices of ordinary people on all sides of the political spectrum in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas, and reveals how Americans from a range of ideological and political perspectives responded to and tried to resolve political and social conflict in the 1960s.