Historical treatments of the United States in the 1960s generally focus on the social movements, political conflicts, popular culture, and lifestyles of the period. Rarely is intellectual history a major concern. At the same time, the sharp images of collective memory have rendered the 1960s peculiarly susceptible to easy labels that simply depict a welcome insurgency or a country coming unglued.

Here, in the first general survey of its kind, Howard Brick resists the temptation to sum up the 1960s with any one meaning or formula; instead, he argues, the time must be grasped in terms of the contradictory trends that ran through it.

In order to reveal the rich intellectual and cultural history of those years, Brick undertakes three tasks: to plot out the principal contradictions or polarities that structured debate and contention in American thought and the arts: to note distinguished figures - such as sociologist Erving Goffman, black modernist poet Melvin Tolson, and feminist literary critic Kate Millett - whose innovations managed to move beyond the restraints imposed by those forms of dualism; and to recognize dilemmas of the 1960s that remained unresolved.

He recognizes two paramount challenges that remain from that time to ours: the unresolved tension between social definitions of public welfare and the individualism of our economic norms; and the conflicting demands facing formal scholarship and art, between standards of expert autonomy and objectivity, on the one hand, and the pressures of political engagement and social responsibility, on the other.