When America turned : reckoning with 1968

The Resource When America turned : reckoning with 1968
Label
When America turned : reckoning with 1968
Title remainder
reckoning with 1968
Statement of responsibility
David Wyatt
Creator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"Much has been written about the seismic shifts in American culture and politics during the 1960s. Yet for all the analysis of that turbulent era, its legacy remains unclear. In this elegantly written book, David Wyatt offers a fresh perspective on the decade by focusing on the pivotal year of 1968. He takes as his point of departure the testimony delivered by returning veteran John Kerry before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1971, as he imagined a time in the future when the word "Vietnam" would mean "the place where America finally turned." But turning from what, to what--and for better or for worse? Wyatt explores these questions as he retraces the decisive moments of 1968--the Tet Offensive, the McCarthy campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the student revolt at Columbia, the "police riot" at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Lyndon Johnson's capitulation, and Richard Nixon's ascendancy to power. Seeking to recover the emotions surrounding these events as well as analyze their significance, Wyatt draws on the insights of what Michael Herr has called "straight" and "secret" histories. The first category consists of work by professional historians, traditional journalists, public figures, and political operatives, while the second includes the writings of novelists, poets, New Journalists, and memoirists. The aim of this parallel approach is to uncover two kinds of truth: a "scholarly truth" grounded in the documented past and an "imaginative truth" that occupies the more ambiguous realm of meaning. Only by reckoning with both, Wyatt believes, can Americans come to understand the true legacy of the 1960s."--Publisher information
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
  • 973.922
  • 973.923
Index
index present
LC call number
E846
LC item number
.W93 2014
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography

Context

Context of When America turned : reckoning with 1968

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Waubonsee Community College. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.