Quest for Identity: America since 1945

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2005 M03 7
Quest for Identity is a survey of the American experience from the close of World War II, through the Cold War and 9/11, to the present. It helps students understand postwar American history through a seamless narrative punctuated with accessible analyses. Randall Woods addresses and explains the major themes that punctuate the period: the Cold War, the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements, and other great changes that led to major realignments of American life. While political history is emphasized, Woods also discusses in equal measure cultural matters and socio-economic problems. Dramatic new patterns of immigration and migration characterized the period as much as the counterculture, the growth of television and the Internet, the interstate highway system, rock and roll, and the exploration of space. The pageantry, drama, irony, poignancy and humor of the American journey since World War II are all here.
 

Contents

The Origins of the Cold
32
Dwight D Eisenhower and the Politics
73
Containing Communism and Managing
99
American Society 19451960
121
John F Kennedy Lyndon B Johnson
155
1
174
Foreign Affairs During
208
Vietnam Black Power
248
American Society 19601980
351
70
353
The Presidencies of Gerald R Ford
399
23
406
Presidency and Foreign Affairs
416
The Carter Malaise
424
The Reagan Era
438
1323
459

32
279
Realpolitik or Imperialism? Nixon Kissinger and American
281
39
298
52
310
Richard M Nixon and
320
64
347
America into the TwentyFirst Century
481
Index
557
78
566
92
575
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About the author (2005)

Randall Bennett Woods is John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. He has written widely on twentieth-century American history, including Dawning of the Cold War (1991), Changing of the Guard (1990), and Fulbright: A Biography (1995), which won both the Ferrell and Ledbetter Prizes. He was also editor of Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (Cambridge, 2003).

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