What Really Happened to the 1960s
How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy
Edward P. Morgan
November 2010
456 pages, 35 photographs, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1756-2, $39.95


“This important book provides an illuminating historical overview, critical analysis, and appraisal of the 1960s. Drawing upon historical and media studies, theories of capitalism and democracy, and in-depth study of the era’s social movements, Morgan provides an extremely comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the events and aftermath of the 1960s. Based on highly impressive research, his study should appeal to a large audience interested in how that decade’s more radical spirit continues to live on in our society.”—Douglas Kellner, author of Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy and Media Culture

“In this sophisticated and provocative analysis, Morgan demonstrates that while the mainstream media has been obsessed with the 1960s, its portrayal has consistently stressed the sensational and violent aspects of that decade while downplaying two of its most important components: a sense of hope that society could be changed and the sense that the basic social, economic, and political structures of American society, in particular the power of corporate capitalism, were at the heart of our problems. Such an approach, Morgan convincingly demonstrates, has helped to create a society in which the mass of the population feels ever more hopeless, alienated, and disconnected from one another, in which our fundamental problems can never even be addressed, much less solved.”
Robert Justin Goldstein, author ofPolitical Repression in Modern America and Flag Burning and Free Speech
 
“By detailing how our historical memory and images of the sixties differ in major respects from what actually happened, Ted Morgan has produced a case study of the past that teaches us a great deal about contemporary political discourse. He shows how the mainstream mass media, in its norms and practices, simultaneously promotes—but also limits and contains—democratic engagement.”
William A. Gamson, author of The Strategy of Social Protest
 
“Political scripts left behind by the corrosive cultural convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s, endlessly depicted and recast by the mass media, are recoded as self-satire, corporate backlash, institutional failure, generational conflict, belligerent discourse, televised violence, and distrusted authority. Morgan’s analysis is a valuable exploration for anyone interested in how the workings of mass media and popular culture in America since the 1960s led us to where we are today.”
Timothy W. Luke, author ofScreens of Power: Ideology, Resistance, and Domination in Informational Society

EDWARD P. MORGAN is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University and author of The Sixties Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America.Right click here to put a message in this box.