Communities across America were thrown into upheaval during the 1960s, when thousands of young people began to publicly question the status quo. Grassroots social movements sprung up on hundreds of college campuses and often spread to surrounding towns, where participants debated race, the role of government, Vietnam, feminism, the cold war, and other issues of the day. Yet this dynamic did not occur in a vacuum: Americans that supported the status quo came together to oppose the activists, and joined a national debate on the meaning of citizenship and patriotism. Rusty L. Monhollon uncovers the voices of ordinary people on all sides of the political spectrum in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas. He reveals how Americans from a range of ideological and political perspectives responded to and tried to resolve political and social conflict in the 1960s. By focusing on a single community, Monhollon vividly demonstrates that the war at home reached deep into the nation's core, and affected the lives of ordinary citizens on a daily basis.

""...illuminate[s] in important ways a major part of recent US history.""--K. Blaser, Choice

""Rusty Monhollon provides a useful corrective to the by-now traditional Berkeley/Upper West Side of New York-centric narratives of the 1960s. Dissent and discord shook middle America in those years, just as they did the better known centers of student activism and racial militancy on the two coasts. But it’s not just the regional angle that makes this book so interesting. In this dark-hued account we encounter a wide range of fallible human beings, political actors on the left and the right, whites and blacks, young and old."" --Maurice Isserman, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History, Hamilton College, and co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s