One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938;Revised Edition

by Richard D. Polenberg

Since its birth the United States has been proclaimed a classless and unified nation, as typified by the myth of the American melting pot. This book seeks to demonstrate that the reality is very different - it is a country divided along the fault lines of class, race, and ethnic identity. Beginning with a look at social divisions as they existed in the 1930s, the book investigates the effects of World War II, the Cold War era, the growth of the suburbs, the new frontier and the great society and the fragmentation of Vietnam, concluding with an analysis of the effects of Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter. The result is a documentation of the change and continuity that characterize four turbulent decades of American life.

Genres: History

368 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1980

About the author

Richard Polenberg is professor of history at Cornell University, where he has received the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award and was appointed Goldwin Smith Professor of American History in 1986. He has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has published widely on twentieth-century American history, including The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process (1997); Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1989), for which he won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award and the Gustavus Myers Foundation's Outstanding Book Award; and One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938 (1980).

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Reviews

[Emily Hewitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the content & subject of this book, which is why I gave it 4 stars. Learning about class, race, and ethnicity in American society from WWI to the late 1970s helps me to better understand how Americans deal with class, race, and ethnicity today. I feel like this book helped me gain more knowledge as to how we got where we are today, including how far we’ve come and how much hasn’t changed at all. This book was a little dry, and since it was published in 1980 it could obviously use some updating. But I recommend this book for anyone trying to learn more about 20th century American history.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eminently readable and taken in retrospect, it provides some insight into the origins of some of our current social issues. Well documented with primary sources and the demographical statistics are kept at a minimum. Unfortunately the final section of the last chapter leaves the reader standing in the middle of the road without a good sense of direction.