“Almost all historians agree that a major historical turning point took place between roughly 1968 and 1974—a “revolution,” a “renaissance,” a “fracture,” a “shock wave,” a point after which “everything changed,” creating a “new America.” Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, for example, argue that the Sixties ushered in a moment of historical rupture on the scale of the American Civil War, dividing the twentieth century into a pre- and post-Sixties world, a change from which “there is no going back, any more than the lost world of the antebellum South could have been restored after 1865.”

— The Upswing ( Robert D. Putnam)