Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

Randall Woods addresses the major themes characterizing the American experience from the close of World War II. Woods' accessible analysis of the Cold War and Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements, as well as other great changes that led to major realignments of American life, clarify postwar American history. Although this book emphasizes political history, it also covers cultural matters and socio-economic problems such as the growth of dramatic new patterns of immigration and migration, the development of the "counterculture", television and the internet, the interstate highway system, rock and roll, and the exploration of space.

Quest for Identity is a survey of the American experience from the close of World War II, through the Cold War and 9/11, to the present.

Randall Bennett Woods is John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. He has written widely on twentieth-century American history, including Dawning of the Cold War (1991), Changing of the Guard (1990), and Fulbright: A Biography (1995), which won both the Ferrell and Ledbetter Prizes. He was also editor of Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (Cambridge, 2003).