The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1981.
Book Information: Google Books; Amazon.com.
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Author Information:
- Martin Jezer (1940–2005), Wikipedia.
- Judy Kuster, Marty Jezer Memorial Webpage, 13 June 2005.
- Marty Jezer. Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Marty Jezer. Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
[Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Video:
Professor Patterson mentioned Jezer's book during the Q&A session of this talk:
James T. Patterson, "U.S. in the 1940s, 50s and 60s," Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, C-SPAN.org, 24 May 1997.
- James T. Patterson (b. 1935), Wikipedia.
- James T. Patterson. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Thomas Hine. Populuxe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. New York: The Overlook Press, 2007.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - David M. Potter. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - John Kenneth Galbraith. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
[Publisher; Wikipedia; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - Gunnar Myrdal and others. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. London: Routledge, 2017.
[Publisher; Wikipedia; Google Books; Amazon.com, volume 1.] - Nicholas Lemann. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Wikipedia Articles:
- Aftermath of World War II.
- Origins of the Cold War.
- Cold War.
- Post–World War II economic expansion.
- History of the United States (1945–1964).
- Presidency of Harry S. Truman, April 1945 – January 1953.
- Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 1953 – January 1961.
- United States in the 1950s.
Jezer's interpretation of U.S. history comes from a radical leftist point-of-view. (More explicitly, by "leftist" I mean the communist-socialist segment of the political spectrum. Part One of the book describes the suppression of communists and communism during the postwar era. Communists lost power in and funding from labor unions. Communists and socialists rebranded themselves as "progressives" but lost power in the Democratic Party to "corporate liberals." Jezer has a doctrinaire aversion to business corporations and examines social factors that undermined working class solidarity. The era was indeed a Dark Age ... for communists.) Jezer explains in his Introduction that the book provides an answer the question: what was it about the society of 1945-1960 that motivated the leftist activism of the 1960s and 1970s? The book tells more about how leftists of the 1960s and 1970s viewed their own past rather than describing the U.S. as experienced by most people during the postwar era, though it does that too.
Readers more interested in U.S. history during 1945-1960 might consider these other books, as noted in this blog:
- Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (1996).
- Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960 (1988).
- McCullough, Truman (1992).
- Halberstam, The Fifties (1993).
- Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (2018).
- Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (2009).