Book Review

Canada and the United States

If, as the saying goes, all politics is local, some historians might make the same argument. Certainly Rusty L. Monhollon presents a strong case for the importance of local history in his study of the 1960s in Lawrence, Kansas. And, unlike many histories of that decade that have been written by former activists (Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage [1987]; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir [1988]), Monhollon represents a new generation of 1960s historians who look at the period from a different point of view, with less personal involvement and more objectivity.

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Mining the archives at the University of Kansas and at the Kansas State Historical Society among other collections of documents as well as local newspapers, Monhollon presents a view of the 1960s that is often dominated by the darker aspects of that decade. Because he has based much of his research on the papers of Kansas politicians, which include letters from constituents and local newspaper reports and editorials, many of the voices that we hear in this account are those of outraged conservatives filled with the passions of the Cold War, who express their contempt for civil rights activists, University of Kansas students and faculty who protested the Vietnam War, and members of the more than colorful local counterculture. In some respects, this story is a much-needed antidote to popular conceptions of the decade as West Coast/East Coast havens of antiwar activists and happy hippies. However, given the number of people who were involved in Lawrence affairs in the 1960s who are still alive, and whose voices might have provided some balance here, the number of oral interviews is surprisingly limited. Certainly Monhollon's book should erase doubts that Kansans were any less affected by the events of the 1960s than New Yorkers or Californians.

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