Social Classes-United States -- United States-Race Relation -- Ethnicity

This book is the most useful and realible social history yet written on the united states in the middle decades of the twentieth century. (John Higham, John Hokins University, in the American Historical Review. Since its birth the United States has been proclaimed a classless and unified nation, as typified by the myth of the American melting pot. The reality is very different, however, as historian Richard Pollenberg convincingly demonstrates in his portrait of a country divided along the fault lines of class, race, and ethnic identity. Beginning eith a look at social divisions as they existed in the 1930s, he investigates these pattern as they were affected by World War II, the Cold War era, growth of suburbs, the New Frontier and the Great Society, and the fragmentation of Vietnam, concluding with an analysis of the effect of Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter. The result is a remarkably vivid documentation of the change and continuity that charcterize four turbulent decades of American life.