Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974

by John Morton Blum

"A vivid and masterful account of the terrible discord and violence of those years."―C. Vann Woodward For fifteen tense and troubled years between the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, the United States struggled to direct its domestic life and its role in a rapidly changing world.

These fifteen years are as rich as any in American history, rich in incident - the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights struggle, the antiwar crusade, the opening of China, Watergate, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's retirement, the fall of Nixon: rich in personality - Robert Kennedy, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Jr, Earl Warren, Bob Dylan, Henry Kissinger, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey: and rich, finally in what it tells us of power, its attainment, and its use at home and abroad.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

542 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

John Morton Blum was an American historian, active from the 1950 to 1991. He was a specialist in 20th-century American political history and a senior advisor to Yale officials.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept this one in the car and read it about 10 minutes a day while waiting for Alex at his school. It's pretty much a textbook, which I read because my education is sorely lacking in modern history. This book helped fill some of those gaps.