Description:
The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. Gay rights, women's rights and civil rights. The Black Panthers and the Vietnam War. The New Left and the New Right. 1968 was a tumultuous year for US politics.
50 years on, Reframing 1968 explores the historical, political and social legacy of 1968 in modern protest movements. 14 interdisciplinary essays look at how protest has changed in the US, from Students for a Democratic Society and the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, to the Women's Movement in the 1970s, through to the contemporary visibility of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
Brief description: Nick Witham is Lecturer in US Political History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is a historian of the twentieth-century United States with a focus on the politics and culture of protest and dissent since the 1960s. He is the author of The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
Review Quotes: Separated into three sections, Reframing 1968 cleverly refrains from a predictable plod through the overfamiliar events of the year. Instead, the collection's authors rethink and reposition 1968 in terms of both its context and its meaning ... Consistently fascinating, Reframing 1968 is an excellent primer for readers seeking both a guide to this crucial year and a wider examination of major trends in American social, cultural and political history. It deserves a large audience.--Joe Street, Northumbria University "History Today"