Major Problems in American History Since 1945

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction designed to orient readers to the major issues under consideration.

In each chapter, a selection of primary documents highlights how individuals in the past thought about the problems that confronted them and suggest how scholars can draw different interpretations from reading the same material.

Each chapter then offers two essays that lay out different approaches to, or interpretations of, a key historical problem presented in that chapter. In some cases, the essays present conflicting points of view, while in others the essays complement each other by analyzing different aspects of the problem in question.

Suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter provide additional resources for readers who wish to delve further into particular topics.

A new chapter analyzes the 1970s as the decade when the postwar boom came to a close and many Americans were forced to confront an era of economic, political, and environmental limits.

Chapter 10, "Political and Popular Cultures of the 1980s," has been revised to move away from an exclusive focus on Ronald Reagan (whose transformative presidency often dominates accounts of the decade) and toward other significant but often overlooked aspects of the 1980s: the nuclear freeze movement, the advent of the personal computer, and the AIDS crisis.

New documents include: Malcolm X on Black nationalism, Rachel Carson on the environment, Henry Kissinger on Vietnam, Jerry Falwell on morality, libertarian political scientist Charles Murray on the Welfare State in the 1980s, and Paul Krugman on the 2008 financial crisis. New essays in the fourth edition reflect important and recent work from scholars such as Melvyn P. Leffler, Julian E. Zelizer, Nancy MacLean, Michael Lind, Fredrik Logevall, Meg Jacobs, Melani McAlister, Bethany Moreton, Sean Wilentz, Heather Ann Thompson, and Niall Ferguson.