Garden City, Estados Unidos : Doubleday, 1969

xxxii, 526 p. ;

Documents in American civilization Series ; AD8

The 1940's in the United States was a period dominated by the war and what followed the war - the bomb and the split between the East and the West. In presenting his documentary record of this period, Chester Eisinger has divided his volume into four parts: The terror (war, the atomic bomb and concentration camps) ; Society in crisis (identity and value, culture and security) ; The radical shift in Political sensibility (the failure of the left and the rise of neoconservatism) ; and the Emergence of the United States as a world power. In these major parts may be seen the decisive shifts characterizing the period - from peace to war, from social consciousness to aestheticism in the arts, from liberalism to conservatism, from the laboratory to the public forum for the scientists, and from isolationism to internationalism. Interwoven through the material are two pervasive themes, the quest for identity and the loss of innocence, that give unity to the whole and show the interrelationships among the four major parts.