Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. By James T. Patterson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xviii, 829 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-507680-X.)

James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations joins Robert Middlekauff's volume on the American Revolution (1982) and James McPherson's on the Civil War (1988) in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States. Organized under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward, the series ought to give us masterworks by master historians, and so far it has delivered. Like its predecessors, Grand Expectations is weighty, thorough, thoughtful, and grounded in the author's own prolific scholarship as well as his command of a vast and rapidly accumulating secondary literature. Gracefully written, Patterson's narrative of the three decades following World War II is also remarkably balanced and judicious, even if sometimes the reader may...