America Dreaming

Steven Heller

America Dreaming, by Laban Carrick Hill, is…an accessible historical account that smartly begins with the simmering postwar '50s and explains the civil rights movement and various social rebellions that followed. Most useful for young readers, it examines the emergence of activist movements that fought for causes like the environment and gay, Native American and women's rights…an excellent textbook for the children and, probably, grandchildren of baby boomers who want to know what the youth culture of the time was all about.
—The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

Hill follows up his Harlem Stomp (2004) with an equally ambitious (and lavishly laid out) social history of the Boomers' finest decade: "Wilder than Gen X, more activist than Gen Y, these youths changed their world like no other generation has before or since." Though rightly noting at the outset that the noisier members of that generation were never more than a minority, he constructs his central narrative around their exploits. He opens with chapters on the '50s and JFK, closing with the grassroots expansion of the environmental movement, but in between shows a pattern of growth and radicalization in the Civil Rights movement, in campus and hippie cultures, and in the efforts of women, Native Americans, Latinos and gays to define and assert their rights. Period photos and splashes of color add visual interest to every page, though used more as design than informational elements. Some minor errors have crept in (it's Maynard G. Krebs, not "Grebs"), and the author's claim that the SCLC's Project C was deliberately intended "to provoke segregationists into violent acts" is, to say the least, controversial. But in general he offers a coherent, big-picture view that will give young readers plenty of insight into the roots of their own cultures. (timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 12-14)