The Sixties and the End of Modern America

by David Steigerwald

The Sixties and the End of Modern America is a history of the period when, the author argues, the modern age in the United States yielded to the postmodern age. The great strengths that had led America to that point, based on industrial capitalism and mass production, and that had allowed a vigorous optimism to flourish, gave way to something more complex and contradictory.
Our contemporary world of rapid deindustrialization, suburbanization, and a triumphant, highly adaptable consumer culture has many of its roots in the sixties. This book gives an account of the period that neither demonizes nor sanctifies a still highly controversial decade, but aims instead to arrive at a clear understanding of the enormous gulf that lies between presixties and postsixties America and how this came about.

Genres: History

328 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[D. Neuser · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable though dated survey. Steigerwald analyzes the turbulent decade of the Sixties primarily through the lens of postmodernism; he argues that America's position as the world's leading "modern" society was undermined and hollowed out in the Sixties by the transition away from the industrial economy. Much of this analysis rings true, but as the conservative 1990s recede into the distance (a book published in 1995 is closer in time to Watergate than to this reader in 2023!) certain developments definitely appear in a different perspective. A more trivial but distinctly annoying flaw: terrible copy-editing, especially the habitual misspelling of names.