David Chalmers' widely acclaimed overview of the 1960s describes how the civil rights movement touched off a widening challenge to traditional values and arrangements. Chalmers recounts the judicial revolution that set national standards for race, politics, policing, and privacy. He examines the long, losing war on poverty and the struggle between the media and the government over the war in Vietnam. He follows feminism's "second wave" and the emergence of the environmental, consumer, and citizen action movements. And he explores the worlds of rock, sex, and drugs, and the entwining of the youth culture, the counterculture, and the American marketplace.

This newly revised edition carries the story into the angry 1990s, in which the shadow of Vietnam still hangs over national policy and the social ethic of the sixties is overshadowed by a conservative counterrevolution against taxes, social programs, and the powers of the national government.