Altered States America Since the Sixties - Jeremy Black (2006).pdf

Publication Date: October 3, 2012

As the home of nearly 300 million people spread over approximately 3.7 million square miles of earth, the United States poses a monumental challenge to all who try to grapple with its rich and immensely complex physical and social geography. Acclaimed historian Jeremy Black tackles this challenge through a literal and metaphorical road trip across America’s physical and historical landscapes, analysing the ways that events in American history and culture since 1960 have remade the geography and demographics of America.Black works from the premise that the United States is a continent pretending to be a country. He examines the cultural clashes – and the tense harmony – between the numerous regional cultures uneasily contained within the United States’ wide bounds. Suburban sprawl, the triumph of consumerism, the war over health care, immigration and Christian evangelicalism all play a part in these pages, as well as the tug of war within us government politics, and the alternating rise and fall of individualism and conformity. Black also has some telling new reflections on America’s role abroad from Nixon’s Vietnam to Bush Junior’s Iraq.In Altered States Black deftly reveals less examined aspects of American culture as they are manifested in the diverse peoples and landscapes that stretch from coast to coast.

Review
“Black’s account of changing geographical and demographic factors in North America reminds readers of the deeper transformations affecting lived society. . . .This is a valuable, thoughtful and wonderfully eccentric account of recent American history.” --Jeremi Suri, author of Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente

Black tackles the formidable task of making sense out of the recent American past and succeeds in creating a framework that provides rich insights and interesting connections. . . . Black’s Altered States now joins my shortlist of books that illuminate recent American history.”—Donald A. Yerxa, editor of Historically Speaking


About the Author
Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of numerous books, including Maps and Politics, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Why Wars Happen, and, from Reaktion Books, Britain since the Seventies: Politics and Society in the Consumer Age.

Product Details
File Size: 590 KB
Print Length: 240 pages

Language: English
ASIN: B009KOWI20