Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore Read Online Free PDF

Kennedy

Restless Giant

Bibliographical Essay

    As footnotes in the text suggest, the literature concerning United States history, 1974–2001, is vast. This essay mentions only those books that proved especially useful to me. It begins by identifying general interpretations of the era and follows by describing sources concerned with various themes and topics: politics, the economy, social trends, religion, race relations, and so on. The bibliography then identifies books (for other sources, see footnotes) that deal with particular time periods, beginning with the 1970s and concluding with the Clinton years through the election of 2000, with a final paragraph concerning statistical sources. Dates of publication ordinarily refer to the most recent printing.
    General Interpretations: An excellent overview of this era is William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York, 2003). Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton, 2004), makes rising inequality the central theme of his critical account of these years. Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, 1995) focuses mainly on foreign and military issues. My earlier book, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York, 1996), is the chronologically previous volume in the Oxford History of the United States; many of its central themes find amplification in this volume.
    A number of general books were especially useful in helping me to think about the main themes of American history between the 1970s and the early 2000s. As their titles suggest, three of these offer interpretations similar to mine: Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York, 2003); David Whitman, The Optimism Gap: The I’m OK—They’re Not Syndrome and the Myth of American Decline (New York, 1998); and Robert Samuelson, The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945–1995 (New York, 1995). Three books that highlight the powerful role of rights-consciousness—a major theme of my volume—are Samuel Walker, The Rights Revolution: Rights and Community in Modern America (New York, 1998); Lawrence Friedman, American Law in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2002); and John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). Other books that look at major trends from a broad historical perspective include Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York, 1997), and Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1976). See also Robert Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Cult of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, 2001).
    Four books that challenge a gloom-and-doom approach often found in the American media are: Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York, 1998); Wolfe, Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now (New York, 2001); Neil Howe and William Strauss, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (New York, 2000); and Strauss and Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York, 1991). Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country (New York, 1998), and Jonathan Freedland, Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic (London, 1998), look at the United States from a comparative perspective (mainly with Britain) and offer acute (as well as entertaining) comments along the way.
    Thematic Books: A host of books center on politics during these years. Among histories, most of them biographically oriented, that highlight presidential politics over time are William Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Bush (Baltimore, 1994); Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush (New York, 1992); William Leuchtenburg, In the