J.Ronald Oakley

This is perhaps my favorite history book, and one I came to know thanks to IASMH's excellent class, "Decades Of Controversy." It deals with America in the 1950s: the politics, the social movements, the wars, presidents, scandals, fads, music, gender relations, race relations--you name it, Oakley has a chapter devoted to it. Better yet, he is remarkably unbiased and objective in his treatment of these issues whilst simultaneously maintaining an engaging and entertaining tone. Oakley's organization of the material is also quite intelligent: he elected to treat each theme in a separate chapter instead of a strictly chronological run through of the entire decade. This treatment, far from compartmentalizing these topics, allows Oakley to deal with them in a clear, logical fashion. Better yet, he manages to ground each topic in the larger framework of the decade without being unnecessarily repetative. My only complaint is that he seems to have vanished into the ether after penning this book (My work here is done?), and I wish he'd written some others.… (mehr)