Grand Expectations

Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quarter-century of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 62 percent of the oil, and 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had three-fourths of the world's gold supplies.

English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the postwar era enjoyed "the greatest prosperity the world has ever known." It was a boom that produced a national euphoria, a buoyant time of grand expectations and an unprecedented faith in our government, in our leaders, and in the American dream - an optimistic spirit which would be shaken by events in the '60s and '70s, and particularly by the Vietnam War.

Now, in Grand Expectations, James T. Patterson has written a magisterial work that weaves the major political, cultural, and economic events of the period into a superb portrait of America from 1945 through Watergate. Here is an era teeming with memorable events - from the bloody campaigns in Korea and the bitterness surrounding McCarthyism to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., and to the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Nixon's resignation.