A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars

Humanities Net - American Religion ^ | Aug 2015 | Andrew Hartman, L. Benjamin Rolsky

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The American electorate is more divided than at any point in recent memory...A consideration of America’s recent past is essential to understanding why polarization defines the character of our contemporary moment and how such division has reached its fever pitch. Lucky for us, the academic study of the culture wars has found its most comprehensive text to date in Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America.

For Hartman, the beginnings of our politically fraught moment can be found not in the debates over the implementation of the New Deal or the battles over temperance as other historians have argued, but rather in the raucous decade of the 1960s...

Hartman’s monograph is the first history of the recent past as understood through its most pervasive framework, the culture wars. As an intellectual historian, he is most interested in how various cultural and social manifestations of American political culture reflected particular ideas about the nation and its public life.

Hartman’s account of the culture wars ranges widely, yet it maintains an admirable attention to nuance and detail in each of the nine chapters, covering such diverse topics as the color line, gender, art, school curricula, and the American mind...

Another argument that Hartman’s analysis relies on for much of its analytic thrust is that the United States gradually became more secular over the course of the twentieth century because of “the waning in the scope of religious authority” (p. 78). Hartman identifies this as the “paradox of American secularization,” namely, that despite such waning “the vast majority of Americans doggedly persisted in religious belief.”

[Inyo-Mono]

In my mind, 1967 was the year of the big change culturally. The so called hippie “Summer of Love” was a big marker in what went before and what came after. 1967 was the true beginning of what everyone now just calls the ‘60s. I was 17 at the time and remember it vividly. Up until 1964 or ‘65, it was still the ‘50s culture in America.

[PeterPrinciple]

Put more simply, the personal has become the political at the expense of politics becoming personal. These conditions make honest dialogue that much more difficult in our contemporary moment, but understanding this dynamic is the first step toward a fuller public life in the twenty-first century.

conclusion of article

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Understand that honest talking is more difficult but do it anyway. Piss some people off for their own good and do it often……………. Wear your MAGA hat.

The other point is you might find another warrior in the process and THEY don’t want us talking and linking up because then we get stronger.

[Fiji Hill]

In my mind, 1967 was the year of the big change culturally. The so called hippie “Summer of Love” was a big marker in what went before and what came after. 1967 was the true beginning of what everyone now just calls the ‘60s. I was 17 at the time and remember it vividly. Up until 1964 or ‘65, it was still the ‘50s culture in America.

Opposing viewpoints:

• The Flower Children--Maria Strasman (1967)

• The Marching Hippies--Guy Drake (1971)

[Fiji Hill]

Some dissenters in the Culture War who took on the Left:

• Freedom's Cause--Bill Floyd (1966)

• The Minutemen Are Turning in Their Graves--Stonewall Jackson (1966)

• Day of Decision--Johnny Sea (1966)

• Take the Time--The Shangri-Las (1967)

[libertylover]

I was also 17 in 1967 and I agree with your comment except offhand I thought it was 1968. Regardless, the hippies set out to change the world, and they have, but not for the better. I wouldn’t want blacks to be treated as they were in the 1960s, but other than that, I can’t think of a single positive change.

[Inyo-Mono]

I agree about the way blacks were treated in the early ‘60s, I saw “Whites Only” and “Blacks Only” drinking fountains and bathrooms on a trip to Texas in 1962. As a kid from California I was appalled.

You may be right about 1968 being the real year that the big cultural shift hit, but to me, where I lived at the time 1967 was the beginning, first year of psychedelic pop music, etc. At any rate, the 1960s as people conceive of it today, didn’t begin until 1967 or ‘68. I don’t recall anyone I knew smoking pot or using drugs until the very early ‘70s.

[foreverfree]

Bump