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

Hartman (Education and the Cold War) does a good job of surveying the cultural issues that split the U.S. in the late 20th century, even if not all readers will agree with his conclusion that the culture wars “are history.” Hartman begins by locating the origins of the culture wars in the 1960s, before focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, which saw debates over reproductive rights, homosexuality, race, religion, and education. Those who lived through those decades won’t find anything particularly novel in his analysis, but millennials will find this useful background for understanding today’s clashes between the right and the left. Hartman does lapse into academese on occasion (“When we think about the neoconservative persuasion as the flip side of the New Left, it should be historically situated relative to what Corey Robin labels ‘the reactionary mind’ ”) and he underestimates the continuing strength of the blue state–red state divide in American life, as seen recently in debates over such issues as same-sex marriage and Obamacare. In general, this is an accessible summary of the recent history of several contentious issues. (May)