This is America?

RUSTY L. MONHOLLON is Assistant Professor of History at Hood College.

'Rusty Monhollon provides a useful corrective to the by-now traditional Berkeley/Upper West Side of New York-centric narratives of the 1960s. Dissent and discord shook middle America in those years, just as they did the better known centers of student activism and racial militancy on the two coasts. But it's not just the regional angle that makes this book so interesting. In this dark-hued account we encounter a wide range of fallible human beings, political actors on the left and the right, whites and blacks, young and old.' - Maurice Isserman, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History, Hamilton College, and co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s 'This Is America? offers us the fullest picture we have of how the Sixties happened proving that it really did happen in the vast stretches of the American prairie. Perhaps its signal achievement is to affirm how much a part of the American mainstream Goldwater-Wallace style conservatism was during the 1960s. This is a story of pitched conflict in the heartland, told sympathetically yet dispassionately.' - Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America 'An extensively researched, in-depth account of the 1960s as they played out in one town in the heartland of America. Monhollon brings to light the sentiments of ordinary citizens across the political spectrum.' - Tom Wells, author of The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam and Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg '...illuminate[s] in important ways a major part of recent US history.' - K Blaser, Choice 'Monhollon reminds us that the 1960s happened with great ferocity in places other than the Deep South and Berkeley, California.' - Chicago Tribune

• Introduction The Homestead of the Free Kansas Must Declare War The Right to These Things The Proper Sense of Values Strength Through Peace or Peace Through Strength? Our Way of Life The American Way This is America? This is Kansas? This is Lawrence? Lawrence Will Become a Police State Epilogue