No year better encapsulates the narrative of the Sixties in America than 1968. Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communication and affiliate professor of history at American University, offers a perspective on a year that transformed the nation.
It was one in which young people went Clean for Gene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary—and were tear-gassed in Chicago. The country looked to larger-than-life leaders to confront war and division and saw them felled by assassins’ bullets. Voters hoped that a Kennedy would return to the White House and instead a Nixon moved into the Oval Office.
Steinhorn views the America of 1968—marked by the Vietnam war, the assassinations of leaders, student unrest, and cultural and racial hostilities—as one that would have been unrecognizable just a few years prior.
To understand the Sixties and how it reshaped the nation, he says, it’s necessary to journey through 1968 and consider how that seminal year influenced American history.
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