Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties

Explores life in America in the early Sixties when Kennedy was President.

W. J. Rorabaugh (Author)

9780521543835, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 March 2004

342 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'A welcome addition to the literature on the fourth American president to be slain while in office. Its brevity and readability ensure that Rorabaugh's study should appeal to both historians and the general reading public.' History

This book explores life in America during that brief promising moment in the early Sixties when John F. Kennedy was President. Kennedy's Cold War frustrations in Cuba and Vietnam worried Americans. The 1962 missile crisis narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster. The civil rights movement gained momentum with student sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and crises in Mississippi and Alabama. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a spokesman for non-violent social change. The American family was undergoing rapid change. Betty Friedan began to launch the Women's Movement. The Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg gained respectability and, at the same time, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan revived folk music. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol produced Pop Art, while Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey began to promote psychedelic drugs. The early Sixties was a period of marked political, social and cultural change which this book relates and discusses.

Introduction
1. Kennedy
2. The cold war
3. Civil rights
4. Families
5. Cosmologies
6. Dallas
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]