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The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II
Note: The ninth edition is here.
This popular and classic text chronicles America's roller-coaster journey through the decades since World War II. Considering both the paradoxes and the possibilities of postwar America, William H. Chafe portrays the significant cultural and political themes that have colored our country's
past and present, including issues of race, class, gender, foreign policy, and economic and social reform. He examines such subjects as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the origins and the end of the Cold War, the culture of the 1970s, the rise of the New Right, the Clinton presidency,
the events of September 11th and their aftermath, the war in Iraq, the 2004 election, and the beginning of George W. Bush's second term.
In this new edition, Chafe provides a nuanced yet unabashed assessment of George W. Bush's presidency, covering his reelection, the saga of the Iraq War, and the administration's response to the widespread devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Chafe also provides a detailed account of the state of the
nation under the Bush administration, including the economic situation, the cultural polarization over such issues as stem cell research and gay marriage, the shifting public opinion of the Iraq War, and the widening gap between the poorest and the wealthiest citizens. Brilliantly written by a
prize-winning historian, The Unfinished Journey, Sixth Edition, is an essential text for all students of recent American history.
This popular and classic text chronicles America's roller-coaster journey through the decades since World War II. Considering both the paradoxes and the possibilities of postwar America, William H. Chafe portrays the significant cultural and political themes that have colored our country's
past and present, including issues of race, class, gender, foreign policy, and economic and social reform. He examines such subjects as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the origins and the end of the Cold War, the culture of the 1970s, the rise of the New Right, the Clinton presidency,
the events of September 11th and their aftermath, the war in Iraq, the 2004 election, and the beginning of George W. Bush's second term.
In this new edition, Chafe provides a nuanced yet unabashed assessment of George W. Bush's presidency, covering his reelection, the saga of the Iraq War, and the administration's response to the widespread devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Chafe also provides a detailed account of the state of the
nation under the Bush administration, including the economic situation, the cultural polarization over such issues as stem cell research and gay marriage, the shifting public opinion of the Iraq War, and the widening gap between the poorest and the wealthiest citizens. Brilliantly written by a
prize-winning historian, The Unfinished Journey, Sixth Edition, is an essential text for all students of recent American history.
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
13 people are currently reading
185 people want to read
About the author
William Henry Chafe
28 books21 followersWilliam Chafe is an American historian, and currently the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 2, 2013
As awful as a history text could be.
Isaiah Berlin, a far more competent historian than Mr. William H. Chafe, maintained that the first duty of the historian is to rigorously say what happened. One would think that principle applied with special force to the author of a twelfth-grade history text, but Mr. Chafe seems never to have heard of such a concept.
This supposed textbook is not history at all, but a personal essay, subjective and slanted. Just the factual mistakes are astonishing. But worse, Chafe packages his jumble of opinions and distortions as objective history. It is an allowable exaggeration to say that the book reads as if it were spewed out over a single weekend in a Berkeley commune.
Here is just a sampling of the book's errors.
To illustrate the venality of the Eisenhower era, Chafe quotes Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense, as follows: "What's good for General Motors' business is good for America". Wilson never said that. What he said was, "What's good for America is good for General Motors, and vice versa", a statement of a different tenor. Chafe is not to be troubled with researching facts, but simply remembers loosely, in keeping with his preconceptions.
In displaying the silliness (as he deems it) of the Cold War, Chafe proclaims, "At no time did Russia constitute a military threat to the United States". No doubt Chafe could picture his 17-year-old pupils at the dinner table, challenging their parents and citing him as authority for that staggeringly ignorant assertion. The tens of thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery pieces arrayed against the Western democracies in central Europe were just decoration, one would suppose.
As for threat to our homeland, Chafe neglects to mention that the Soviet Union had more nuclear warheads aimed at our territory than we had aimed at theirs. Ah, but the Soviets were pure of heart, I guess. That's why they were no threat.
There are small errors that are trivial in themselves, but illustrative of his carelessness. He puts "Casablanca" in the wrong year, for example. No big deal, except he had just detained us with a long discourse on the movies of the era, strutting his expertise. No true movie buff would commit the "Casablanca" gaffe.
In addition to pure errors, Chafe is distortively selective. He expatiates about "big business", labor, "consumerism", and social welfare. But he says nothing at all on the larger subject of the contending schools of economic thought, one of he most consequential intellectual debates of the century (only a few offhand disparagments of "ideological" Reaganomics).
The errors and distortions are especially obvious in his treatment of the Vietnam War. He devotes a hundred pages to it, but he says nothing about the military strategies of the contending sides, their strengths and weaknesses. He never mentions Ia Drang, or Dak To, or Hamburger Hill, or Khe Sanh. This is equivalent to a World War II history that never mentions Stalingrad, or Utah Beach, or The Bulge.
Chafe features, as an emblem of "the end result" of the war, the notorious quote from an American officer that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". He identifies the village as Bien Hoa. Bien Hoa is not a village at all, but a large urban suburb of Saigon, and the site of a huge U.S. military complex. The actual village was Ben Suc, a rural hamlet in the communist-controlled Iron Triangle to the north. No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of the country would make this mistake. It is equivalent to confusing London with Antwerp.
His ignorance is not just geographical, but racial and cultural as well. He subscribes to the racialist notion, reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, that the Vietnamese people are different from us, innately primitive and sluggish, unsuited to democracy and uninterested in freedom. As part of the evidence, he delivers to our children the old 1960s shibboleth about the Vietnamese language "not even having a word for the personal pronoun 'I'". This is not just incorrect, but laughable. He overflows with opinions about Vietnam, but knows next to nothing of he place.
Chafe almost crows over the My Lai massacre of 350 civilians, an isolated crime by a renegade platoon, and holds it to be "the ultimate consequence" of the general American attitude. But he holds the systematic, high-command-ordered communist execution of 5000 civilians at Hue the same year to be so inconsequential as not to be worth mentioning.
Instead of history, this book is in the nature of a sermon. Chafe is like the fundamentalist preacher who simply assumes everyone shares his belief in the literal truth of The Creation, and if you don't, well, that's proof of your moral degeneracy.
Someone once said "No life is completlely wasted. It can always serve as a bad example." Chafe's book can be made useful as a model of how our students should never write an academic work. I'm afraid, though, that the strategy might backfire, like that of the father who gives his son or daughter a cigarette to teach them how bad smoking is.
Isaiah Berlin, a far more competent historian than Mr. William H. Chafe, maintained that the first duty of the historian is to rigorously say what happened. One would think that principle applied with special force to the author of a twelfth-grade history text, but Mr. Chafe seems never to have heard of such a concept.
This supposed textbook is not history at all, but a personal essay, subjective and slanted. Just the factual mistakes are astonishing. But worse, Chafe packages his jumble of opinions and distortions as objective history. It is an allowable exaggeration to say that the book reads as if it were spewed out over a single weekend in a Berkeley commune.
Here is just a sampling of the book's errors.
To illustrate the venality of the Eisenhower era, Chafe quotes Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense, as follows: "What's good for General Motors' business is good for America". Wilson never said that. What he said was, "What's good for America is good for General Motors, and vice versa", a statement of a different tenor. Chafe is not to be troubled with researching facts, but simply remembers loosely, in keeping with his preconceptions.
In displaying the silliness (as he deems it) of the Cold War, Chafe proclaims, "At no time did Russia constitute a military threat to the United States". No doubt Chafe could picture his 17-year-old pupils at the dinner table, challenging their parents and citing him as authority for that staggeringly ignorant assertion. The tens of thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery pieces arrayed against the Western democracies in central Europe were just decoration, one would suppose.
As for threat to our homeland, Chafe neglects to mention that the Soviet Union had more nuclear warheads aimed at our territory than we had aimed at theirs. Ah, but the Soviets were pure of heart, I guess. That's why they were no threat.
There are small errors that are trivial in themselves, but illustrative of his carelessness. He puts "Casablanca" in the wrong year, for example. No big deal, except he had just detained us with a long discourse on the movies of the era, strutting his expertise. No true movie buff would commit the "Casablanca" gaffe.
In addition to pure errors, Chafe is distortively selective. He expatiates about "big business", labor, "consumerism", and social welfare. But he says nothing at all on the larger subject of the contending schools of economic thought, one of he most consequential intellectual debates of the century (only a few offhand disparagments of "ideological" Reaganomics).
The errors and distortions are especially obvious in his treatment of the Vietnam War. He devotes a hundred pages to it, but he says nothing about the military strategies of the contending sides, their strengths and weaknesses. He never mentions Ia Drang, or Dak To, or Hamburger Hill, or Khe Sanh. This is equivalent to a World War II history that never mentions Stalingrad, or Utah Beach, or The Bulge.
Chafe features, as an emblem of "the end result" of the war, the notorious quote from an American officer that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". He identifies the village as Bien Hoa. Bien Hoa is not a village at all, but a large urban suburb of Saigon, and the site of a huge U.S. military complex. The actual village was Ben Suc, a rural hamlet in the communist-controlled Iron Triangle to the north. No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of the country would make this mistake. It is equivalent to confusing London with Antwerp.
His ignorance is not just geographical, but racial and cultural as well. He subscribes to the racialist notion, reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, that the Vietnamese people are different from us, innately primitive and sluggish, unsuited to democracy and uninterested in freedom. As part of the evidence, he delivers to our children the old 1960s shibboleth about the Vietnamese language "not even having a word for the personal pronoun 'I'". This is not just incorrect, but laughable. He overflows with opinions about Vietnam, but knows next to nothing of he place.
Chafe almost crows over the My Lai massacre of 350 civilians, an isolated crime by a renegade platoon, and holds it to be "the ultimate consequence" of the general American attitude. But he holds the systematic, high-command-ordered communist execution of 5000 civilians at Hue the same year to be so inconsequential as not to be worth mentioning.
Instead of history, this book is in the nature of a sermon. Chafe is like the fundamentalist preacher who simply assumes everyone shares his belief in the literal truth of The Creation, and if you don't, well, that's proof of your moral degeneracy.
Someone once said "No life is completlely wasted. It can always serve as a bad example." Chafe's book can be made useful as a model of how our students should never write an academic work. I'm afraid, though, that the strategy might backfire, like that of the father who gives his son or daughter a cigarette to teach them how bad smoking is.
January 2, 2025
Read the first 500 pages for class and couldn't not finish it for goodreads 😊
Super good though, incredibly dense but very well-written.
Super good though, incredibly dense but very well-written.
April 21, 2011
This book was surprisingly interesting. It was a history textbook, so I didn't expect much from it, but it turned out to be an okay read. It was relatively easy to get through. My only complaint is that things that could've been said in a paragraph or two were stretched out for pages upon pages with the same concept being repeated several times. The end result is that if you slave through the chapters, you'll know everything by heart, but it's frustrating to have gone through 7 pages and realize that they've really only said the same thing over and over.
December 23, 2014
Chafe is a very engaging writer, but The Unfinished Journey's historically-questionable statements, selective topicality, and blatant progressivism are all hindrances to the work's purportedly honest attempts to accurately chronicle post-World War II America's domestic and foreign fronts. An uneven journey, to say the least.
December 22, 2018
For a text book it doesn't get much better. Written from what appears to be a socdem perspective. Reading this I can see how some ignorant reactionaries view universities as breeding grounds for Marxism. Sadly this book isn’t Marxist and neither are universities. That being said I enjoyed reading all 600 pages.
December 13, 2011
This was a really cool book! I was pleasantly surprised since this is a text book for a class. I actually read the whole thing rather than just assigned portions
May 5, 2017
Extraordinarily fair take on both the successes and failures of the presidents from FDR to Obama. Chafe seems to have a bit of a left-leaning bias, but he is tough on the liberal presidents for their inconsistent and sometimes downright negative handling of civil rights issues. Chafe's main thesis is that the post-war United States hinges around the year 1968. While I'm not fully convinced this is the best reading of contemporary history, he does make a very reasonable case. Some readers may find him overly harsh on Reagan and Clinton, but I think the criticisms are fair. The only major oversight I noticed in the read-through was his failure to cover Nixon's role in the Yom Kippur War, and in general I think Chafe undercuts Nixon on foreign affairs a bit too much.
June 2, 2020
You know how they say what you study in class always has a strangely perfect, timely connection to what's happening in the outside world? This textbook was the ultimate manifestation of that.
I read this text for a class and was quite impressed. It thoroughly details American politics since 1945 and explored the relationships between the systems and governments and the developments.
This is not a light read in the slightest, and many chapters were partially skim read. I do, however believe I will continually return to this book in my teaching of modern history and in my ongoing observation of American politics and society.
I read this text for a class and was quite impressed. It thoroughly details American politics since 1945 and explored the relationships between the systems and governments and the developments.
This is not a light read in the slightest, and many chapters were partially skim read. I do, however believe I will continually return to this book in my teaching of modern history and in my ongoing observation of American politics and society.
June 4, 2019
I had to buy this book for a class about the U.S Since television and couldn't put it down after that. This book provides a clear and precise summary of many historically significant periods. One cannot expect the minute details that make history beautiful to always be in the book, however if you need a refresher on history or just need an introduction this is the right book. Personally I find the period right after World War Two to be the most interesting in US history and loved every chapter.
October 25, 2024
I admittedly only read sections of this assigned in my Law and the 1960s seminar, but what we did read was a cogent and compelling assessment of that time. The detail with which it explores each president’s reaction and relative inaction in response to the Civil Rights movement is fascinating.
December 26, 2024
Written to be clear and concise in detail
November 29, 2020
An wonderfully 'readable' history text book. Thank you, Dr. Michele Gillespie for using this book in your classroom!
August 31, 2011
The present is always a product of the past - and in a time where the present becomes increasingly complicated, the importance of understanding the past cannot be over-emphasized. "The Unfinished Journey" is a guide-book to America's past, presenting historical facts and opinions with wit and intelligent analysis. Beginning with the end of WWII and ending with Reagan's presidency, it examines social and cultural trends in the USA, focusing on the issues of race, gender and class, combining a lively depiction of the character of each important player in US history with a rigourous analysis of their political motives and actions. It might take some time to get used to the extensive descriptions, often discussing single concepts or historical opinions for what might just be a tiny bit too long, but trust me: it is worth it. If you can read this book as you would read a novel, read it as the story of a country rather than as just another boring textbook, it will reward you with becoming just that: a fascinating thriller with, full of suspense and unexpected turns in the plot-line.
to-keep-reference
October 18, 2016William Chafe situó a 1968 como un cambio de régimen en los Estados Unidos, desde la perspectiva de historiador social: “Cualquier historiador que utilice la palabra „vertiente‟ para describir un momento dado corre el riesgo de sobresimplificar la complejidad del proceso histórico. Sin embargo, si esta palabra se emplea para indicar un punto de inflexión que señala el fin de la dominación de una constelación de fuerzas y el comienzo de la dominación de otras, parece apropiado para describir lo que ocurrió en América en 1968”. William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 378. Chafe captura justamente lo que queremos decir con un cambio en el régimen constitucional, es decir, el fin de la dominación de una constelación de fuerzas y el comienzo de la dominación de otra. Sobre el análisis de Chafe del espíritu republicano de los movimientos, ver pp. 302-342.
Imperio Pág.136
Imperio Pág.136
January 17, 2013
really goood
January 16, 2018
Chafe offers us a history of the post war period that one would best categorize as "progressive," a history in which the activism of everyday people is the driving engine of change that enables progress on issues of social justice in the halls of power. A historian of both the civil rights and women's movements, his account weaves considerations of race, gender and class into a subtle narrative. From the vantage point he affords us, the self-congratulatory pose of official America during the latter half of the 20th century once again appears suspect. As Richard Dalfiume notes in his review for the JAH, Chafe's history is an effort to invite student of these last six decades of American history to question the extent to which one's prospects in America are, after all is said and done, still delimited primarily by the accident of one's birth.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews