Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love

Hip: The History

John Leland · 405 pages

Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

Jeff Chang, D.J. Kool Herc · 546 pages

Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop has been a generation-defining global movement. In a post-civil rights era rapidly transformed by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop gave voiceless youths a chance to address these seismic changes, and became a job-making engine and the Esperanto of youth rebellion. Hip-hop crystallized a multiracial generation's worldview

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe · 416 pages

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi

1969: The Year Everything Changed

Rob Kirkpatrick · 320 pages

The Fifties

David Halberstam · 808 pages

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the A

1959: The Year Everything Changed

Fred Kaplan · 322 pages

Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that fo

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby · 357 pages

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence

Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream

Jay Stevens · 413 pages

Hamilton: The Revolution

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter · 287 pages

Offers a behind-the-scenes view of Hamilton the musical, detailing the many dramatic episodes in Alexander Hamilton's life.

Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture

Simon Reynolds · 454 pages

Generation Ecstasy is the story of rave culture and techno music. Challenging traditional ideas about music and spawning a global network of underground scenes based on the frenzied euphoria of the all-night dance party, rave is the most innovative, influential, and controversial pop phenomenon since punk rock. A celebration of rave's quest for the perfect beat and the ultimate rush, Generation Ec

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman · 258 pages

"Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one has done it quite like Chuck Klosterman. With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real differen

The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault)

P.J. O'Rourke · 267 pages

With his typical wit and keen analysis, O'Rourke looks at the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and somehow created a better society by turning society upside down.

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America

Ayana Byrd, Lori L. Tharps · 208 pages

To Marry an English Lord

Gail MacColl, Carol Wallace · 403 pages

In 1895, nine American girls married peers of the British realm. It was the peak year of a social phenomenon that began when the entrenched members of old New York snubbed these "new money" families after the Civil War, sending them off to England in quest of class. MacColl presents a rich tapestry of essays, sidebars, fact-filled boxes, and lively anecdotes to chronicle the era respresnted by Dow

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

David Hajdu · 456 pages

An informal and personal description of the rise and fall of comic books in the '40s and '50s, with a focus on the Educational Comics (E.C.) company run by Gains, father then son (M.C. then William). The fall came in two steps, the first in the '40s and aimed at crime comics, and the second in the '50s and aimed at almost all comics, but with emphasis on horror comics.

How Music Works

David Byrne · 352 pages

The Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductee and co-founder of Talking Heads presents a celebration of music that offers insight into the roles of time, place, and recording technology, discussing how evolutionary patterns of adaptations and responses to cultural and physical contexts have influenced music expression throughout history and culminated in the 20th century's transformative practices.

Hip Hop Family Tree, Vol. 2: 1981-1983

Ed Piskor · 112 pages

"Book 2 covers the early years of 1981-1983, when Hip Hop has made a big transition from the parks and rec rooms to downtown clubs and vinyl records. The performers make moves to separate themselves from the paying customers by dressing more and more flamboyantly until a young group called RUN-DMC comes on the scene to take things back to the streets. This volume covers hits like Afrika Bambaataa'

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

Susan J. Douglas · 368 pages

1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year

David Hepworth · 307 pages

Britpop!: Cool Britannia And The Spectacular Demise Of English Rock

John Harris · 468 pages

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

Don Lattin · 256 pages

Lattin examines the lives and times of four men--Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Andrew Weil, and Huston Smith--whose paths crossed in the 1960s at Harvard, and who consequently launched the mind, body, spirit movement.

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America

Jonathan Gould · 661 pages

A cultural and musical history of the 1960s in Britain and America captures the pulse of the era through the music of the Beatles, critically analyzing why the group became a trans-Atlantic phenomenon while discussing the evolution of the group's music.

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

Sara Marcus · 367 pages

A history of Riot Grrrl, a radical feminist movement that was started in the 1990s by young women who were fed up with sexism and harrassment and decided to make some noise.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain · 525 pages

A contemporary classic, **Please Kill Me** is the definitive oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements. Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and scores of other punk figures lend their voices to this decisive account of that explosive era.