THE SHATTERING HAS its distant origins in Eddy Street’s Fourth of July photo, which I first saw many years ago in The American Image: Photographs from the National Archives, 1860–1960 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). For reasons I can’t explain, the image fascinated me, so much so that when I started teaching an undergraduate course on the 1960s sixteen years ago, I used it to open the first lecture. At the time I knew that it had been taken somewhere in Chicago in 1961. There its story stopped as far as I was concerned, until I set out to write The Shattering.
The most important sources for my re-creation of the Cahills’ story are the long conversations and subsequent email exchanges I had with Judy Kagan, Ed and Stella’s first child, whose generosity opened up her family’s history as nothing else could. My notes of those conversations and the emails themselves are in my possession. Around Judy’s memories I arrayed a wide range of primary sources. Ship manifests marked the immigration of Stella’s parents, Adam Rompala and Stefania Gorska. The United States manuscript census lays out the Cahill family’s path in the United States from 1860 onward, and the Rompala family’s path from 1910. The 1930 and 1940 manuscript censuses also allowed me to re-create the Eddy Street neighborhood. The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago holds the records of Stella’s parents’ marriage and her father’s burial. Her mother’s remarriage, along with the marriage of Ed’s parents, his father’s remarriage, and Ed and Stella’s marriage, are recorded in the Cook County, Illinois, marriage index. The timing of Ed’s military service is noted in the United States Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS Death File, 1850–2010. All of those sources are available through the invaluable website ancestry.com.
Stella’s peripatetic childhood can be traced through Chicago’s city directories, published annually in the 1920s and available at Chicago’s fabulous Newberry Library. Details on Stella’s schooling come from The Harrisonian: A Chronicle of Harrison Technical High School and Harrison Activities (Chicago: Senior Class Publisher, 1932), which is in the possession of the Chicago History Museum. Ed’s education I followed through his high school record at the Chicago Archdiocese Archives. The home ownership records for the house Stella’s mother bought, and the Cahills’ bungalow, can be found at the Cook County, Illinois, Recorder of Deeds, and the election results for the Cahills’ ward in the records of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners at the Municipal Reference Collection of the Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library. For Judy Cahill’s college career I drew on The DePaulian (Chicago: DePaul University, 1962). Terry Cahill’s high school experience comes from the 1961 to 1965 editions of the St. Patrick High School yearbook and a selection of unprocessed papers about the school, which were made available to me by St. Patrick’s librarian. Terry’s college career and that of his younger sister Kathy are detailed in the digitized material on the Notre Dame University Archives website, http://archives.nd.edu/digital/.
As I moved beyond the Cahills’ story, I turned to other primary sources. Digitization has given historians immediate access to the newspapers and magazines that were central to the media markets of the 1960s. I made particularly heavy use of the New York Times and the Washington Post, though I also read my share of stories in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Constitution, Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, and—for Joan Didion’s early work—the Saturday Evening Post. The poll results that appear throughout The Shattering come primarily from the extraordinary collections of Cornell University’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, available through the center’s iPoll database. I supplemented those figures with Gallup Poll data published in the period’s newspapers. The demographics of postwar presidential elections I drew from Warren E. Miller and Santa Traugott, American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook, 1952–1986 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and from Gallup postelection surveys, some published in the newspapers and others available at gallup.com.
I followed the hesitant and uneven development of postwar prosperity through a series of revealing government reports: U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings, May 21–July 26, 1951 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951); U.S. Department of Commerce, “Current Population Reports: Consumer Income,” April 27, 1954, December 1955, and April 1958; United States Department of Labor, Nonfarm Housing Starts, 1889–1958 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Construction Reports: Value of New Construction Put in Place, 1946–1963 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964); and the comprehensive data sets put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, available at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/. For illuminating material on white flight in Chicago, I turned to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings, May 5–6, 1959 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959). And I traced the cost of the Vietnam War partly through William W. Kaufman, “Choices and Trends in the Defense Budget,” February 16, 1970, William Kaufman Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, available at https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/WWKPP/001/WWKPP-001-003.
I also relied on a number of collections of presidential documents: Robert Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1997); Michael Bechloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Michael Bechloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), and H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994). I read the diary—which in its published version is far from complete—alongside Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, eds., The Nixon Tapes, 1971–1972 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2014). I made frequent use of the spectacular collection of presidential speeches and taped conversations at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Visit https://millercenter.org/the-presidency to see the center’s holdings. Richard Nixon’s daily diary provided compelling detail at several key points in the narrative. A digitized version is available through the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, at https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/president/presidential-daily-diary.
Although primary sources were fundamental to shaping the story I tell, The Shattering is a synthesis, built on and profoundly indebted to the many scholars and journalists who have defined the history of the postwar era. I had superb examples of syntheses to follow, foremost among them David Farber, Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); and Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). As I explain in the prologue, The Shattering also reframes the 1960s in ways inspired by important recent developments in the historical literature. That’s not to suggest that I’m leaving older histories behind; some of the finest historical writing on the 1960s stretches back decades. My goal is to fuse those histories with the best of the newer scholarship. What follows is a record of my largest debts. Anyone interested in a comprehensive bibliography can follow the links at https://history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/kevin-boyle.html.
My sense of the postwar political order starts with two indispensable histories of the New Deal and World War II: David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). For the intricacies of the wartime and immediate postwar domestic front, I am particularly indebted to James Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). The most insightful analyses of Dwight Eisenhower are Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 87 (February 1982); Fred Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and William Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). Tracing the complexities of the defense budget was challenging. I relied on three outstanding Defense Department studies: Doris M. Condit, The Test of War, 1950–1953 (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1988); Richard Leighton, Strategy, Money and the New Look, 1953–1956 (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001); and Robert Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956–1960 (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997).
There is now a profoundly important literature on the repression and restrictions of the mid-twentieth century. On the constriction of gay life, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Also see Christopher Elias’s outstanding Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). The key studies of race and housing policy are Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017); and Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2018). My understanding of Chicago’s postwar segregation comes from Laura McEnaney’s splendid Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Arnold Hirsh, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000); and Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
The following were particularly useful in shaping my reading of the early Cold War, the other critical component of the postwar political order: Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011); and Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010). Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) expanded my perspective. My account of the United States’ deepening involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s relies to a considerable extent on Fredrik Logevall’s magnificent Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012). On the Eisenhower-era gold tangle, see Francis Gavin, Gold, Dollars and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
There is a vast and uneven literature on John Kennedy. Among the best studies is Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), a balanced biography deepened by unprecedented access to primary sources. The best sources on JFK’s family history, which I see as pivotal, are David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2012); and Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1965 (New York: Random House, 2020). Of the many books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) remains unmatched. On Kennedy’s Vietnam policy and the toppling of Diem, see David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000).
In recent decades historians have dramatically expanded the length and breadth of the civil rights movement. Among the many exemplary studies of the nation’s racial regime and the movement’s long campaign to break it, I am most indebted to Ibram Kedzi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016); Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009); Colin Grant, Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robin D. G. Kelley’s brilliant Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976); Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010); Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); and David Margolick, “Through a Lens, Darkly,” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007, for his evocative retelling of Elizabeth Eckford’s experience in front of Little Rock High School.
My account of the civil rights movement in the 1960s draws a good deal of information and inspiration from Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume narrative, America in the King Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989–2006); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Clayborne Carson’s classic In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); William Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); and James Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
For the Nationalist side of the movement I relied particularly on Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life (New York: Viking, 2011); Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (New York: Liveright, 2020); Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014); Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
As civil rights history has expanded, so has the history of modern American conservatism. For its suburban and corporate strands, I turned to Lisa McGirr’s pathbreaking Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); and Kim Phillips-Fein’s invaluable Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Conservatism’s southern strand is powerfully explicated in Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservativism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), a book whose influence runs through The Shattering; and Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).
The long histories of civil rights and conservatism intersect with the mid-1960s burst of reform in complex ways. On Lyndon Johnson, civil rights, and social policy, see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s still-revealing Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume Four (New York: Vintage, 2013); Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013); and Julian Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin Press, 2015). On the contested relationship between the Great Society and racialized policing, see Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Michael Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) is an excellent study of the first urban rebellion of the mid-1960s. The other rebellions await comparable treatment.
The mid-1960s reformation of the state’s relationship to sexuality also intersects with a long history of activism. I began with updated versions of two brilliant foundational books: John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Valuable entry points into midcentury gender politics include Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Johnson, The Lavender Scare, cited above; and Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). My tracing of the long road to Griswold draws particularly on David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1994); Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); and Sarah Igo’s imposing The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Also see Leslie Reagan’s essential When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
I give the counterculture far less attention than do other historians of the 1960s. For a sweeping analysis see Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1858–c. 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Also see Bill Morgan, The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (New York: Free Press, 2010); and Michael Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The details of Ken Kesey’s story and Joan Didion’s reporting from the Haight come from two classic pieces of 1960s journalism: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1968); and Joan Didion, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967. Didion describes her history in portions of The White Album and Where I Was From, reprinted in Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Knopf, 2006).
The literature on the Vietnam War is enormous. The best introduction remains George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2019). Of the many books on LBJ’s escalation, I found most valuable Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1995); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kaiser, An American Tragedy, cited above; and Brian VanDeMark, Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: William Morrow, 2018). Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), is indispensable, as is Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003). For the financial cost of the war I used Edward Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 1965–1969 (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2011). My descriptions of James Farley’s combat trauma and Norman Morrison’s self-immolation come from Paul Hendrickson’s extraordinary The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (New York: Knopf, 1996). The story of Ben Suc’s destruction is from Jonathan Schell, “A Reporter at Large: The Village of Ben Suc,” The New Yorker, July 15, 1967, 28–93.
On the origins and complications of the New Left, see Jim Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Sara Evans’s important Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979); and Robert Cohen, Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the breadth of the movement, see Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield’s encyclopedic An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). Kenneth Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993) is crucial for contextualizing Kent State. The scholarship has almost completely overlooked the conservative side of the movement. An exception is Sandra Scanlon, The Pro-War Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
My retelling of 1968 is indebted to Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); John Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017); Robert Collins, “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century,’ ” American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 396–422; Michael Honey’s beautiful Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Arnold Offner, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Carter, Politics of Rage, and Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh, both cited above. Also see the best of that year’s election chronicles, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking, 1969).
My interpretation of the Nixon presidency is derived from the brilliant reconceptualization of late twentieth-century politics that Matthew Lassiter offers in The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), and “Political History beyond the Blue-Red Divide,” Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 760–64. My descriptions of the politics and policies of the Nixon White House benefited enormously from Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Farrell, Richard Nixon; Perlstein, Nixonland; Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, cited above; Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), which should be read alongside Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 2001); and Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020); and Joanne Gowa, Closing the Gold Window: Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990) is still the best narrative of the Watergate affair.
I built Norma McCorvey’s story from her first memoir (with Andy Meisler), I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); and Joshua Prager’s powerful article, “The Accidental Activist,” Vanity Fair, January 18, 2013. For the politics of abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the route to Roe, I relied on Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime, cited above; Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, cited above; Sarah Weddington, A Question of Choice (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992); Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); and Daniel Williams’s valuable Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). There are excellent studies of school integration and busing in particular locations, among them Brett Gadsden’s Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). But there isn’t a broad history of busing. Lassiter, Silent Majority, cited above, is essential on Charlotte’s school integration. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, cited above, contextualizes Milliken v. Bradley. On George McGovern’s base, see Lily Geismer’s valuable Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).