No decade since the end of World War II has been as seminal in its historical significance as the 1960s. That stormy period unleashed a host of pent-up social and generational conflicts that had not been experienced since the Civil War: intense racial and ethnic strife, cold war terror, the Vietnam War, counter-cultural protests, controversial social engineering, and political rancour. Numerous studies on various aspects of these issues have been written over the past 35 years, but few have so successfully integrated the many-sided components into a coherent, synthetic, and reliable book that combines good storytelling with sound scholarly analysis. The main materials covered are the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the protest it generated, the New Left, student radicals, and Black student militancy, and, finally, the counter-cultural side of the 60s: hippies, sex and Rock 'n' Roll.