SUGGESTED READING ★ A-15CHAPTER 24
BOOKS
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (1988).
A comprehensive account of the civil rights movement from the Brown
decision to the early 1960s.
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-
war America (2003). Considers how the glorification of consumer freedom
shaped American public policy and the physical landscape.
De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-
Century Europe (2005). An examination of American “soft power” and its
triumphant penetration of twentieth- century Europe.
Fones- Wolf, Elizabeth A. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor
and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (1994). Examines the carefully developed
campaign whereby business leaders associated capitalism and a union- free
workplace with freedom.
Freeman, Joshua B. Working- Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II
(2000). An account of the lives of laborers in the nation’s largest city, trac-
ing the rise and decline of the labor movement.
Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of
Containment (2008). How religious groups influenced American diplomacy
at the height of the Cold War.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (1985).
The standard account of the development of American suburbia.
Jacobs, Meg. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth- Century Amer-
ica (2005). Discusses how consumer freedom became central to Americans’
national identity after World War II.
Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (2004). A full study of Supreme Court cases deal-
ing with civil rights, and how they both reflected and helped to stimulate
social change.
Klein, Jennifer. For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s
Public- Private Welfare State (2003). Examines the development of the “social
contract” of the 1950s whereby many workers received social benefits
from their employers rather than the government.
May, Elaine T. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988).
Studies the nuclear family as a bastion of American freedom during the
Cold War, at least according to official propaganda.