Recommend a concise history of 20th century America

I'd like to read a well-regarded, balanced, *concise* history of 20th century America - got a recommendation? 

What focus? Political history? Social? Cultural? Economic? How long? How much background/education do you have in history generally?

General histories are always going to be a compromise, as I'm sure you know, but it's best to have an idea of what you're looking to get from the book.

Yeah, I think more specific.  There has been a lot of stuff happen in the last 240 years...

Some people were here.  New people came. People grew stuff, some fought, some loved, some liked stuff, some hated it ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

We didn’t start the fire.  It was always burning since the world was turning.

In reply to KyAllroad (Jeremy) :

The old people definitely accused the young people of dumping gas on that fire though.

EastCoastMojo said:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

That's Britain and France....

You know... WWII is in there.... that's a bit of a read on it's own!  (and clearly was influenced by and has HUGE influence on the century).

02Pilot said:

What focus? Political history? Social? Cultural? Economic? How long? How much background/education do you have in history generally?

General histories are always going to be a compromise, as I'm sure you know, but it's best to have an idea of what you're looking to get from the book.

Social and cultural - understand that economic and political forces drive this stuff. Also understand that perhaps there's no way to get a handle on this without devoting some time, so maybe "concise" is unreasonable. 

The question is spurred by my looking at photographer Robert Frank's seminal mid-50s book Americans - some of the images show social rebellion (motorcycle culture, for example) - I'd like to understand how this evolved, the Beats, rock and roll, etc. Perhaps I could rephrase the question: is there a book that broadly explores postwar American socio-cultural phenomena. I earlier asked about the whole century because I assume that you have to start somewhere...

I have limited understanding of history, beyond the western civ and US history I've mostly forgotten 30+ years later. 

OK, I know Frank's book very well, so I know exactly where you're coming from. I'm a historian, and I teach survey classes in US history (among other things), but cultural history is not my field of expertise, so take my recommendations with several grains of salt. They're based mostly on looking at what's available through eyes trained to roughly evaluate history books at a glance, not from having read them through.

I'd start with Joel Dinerstein's The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. I can't find a preview text of it, but based on a couple of newspaper reviews another possible title is Grace Elizabeth Hale's A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. More specialized texts on issues of race and gender are available (for example, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue seems like it might be useful).

I don't know if these are too specific for your purposes, but based on your brief I think this is where you want to start, as long as you have enough background to contextualize it. If you need something more general to start with, I'm currently using Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! (Vol.2) as the text in my US since 1877 surveys - it's decent and, being a college textbook, is organized in a way that you could easily use it as a reference rather than having to read it cover to cover.

EDIT: And I just spotted a pre-release notification for William Hitchcock's The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. Looks more political and foreign policy than the others, but might be useful nonetheless. Out in March.

If you want to understand the 20th century, I would strongly recommend that you first read the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. It explains the beginning of WWI, which is the pivotal event of the 20th Century.  The events leading up to WWII were all set in motion by WWI. 

In reply to 02Pilot :

Thank you for the recommendations, 02Pilot and Floating Doc - I will start with Dinerstein and also check out Tuchman. 

I think I have this somewhere.

Covers the 20th Century up to its publication.  You might even have used it  in high school.

I definitely have his History of American Business on the shelf.

Thomas V. DiBacco. 

In reply to procainestart :

Not a problem.

A note on Tuchman: while Guns of August is a classic, it's also fairly dated at this point. Depending on how long a read you want, more modern books on the subject are David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, and the excellent Dreadnought by Robert Massie, which comes in at ~900 pages. Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919 does a very good job covering the peace conference, which arguably set the stage for much of the history of the 20th Century and is more US-focused than the events of 1914.

Hopefully not a repost. Left leaning, but bang-on, In My Opinion.

wheelsmithy said:

Hopefully not a repost. Left leaning, but bang-on, In My Opinion.

Glad someone else mentioned this book.  I've read it a couple of times but couldn't remember authors name.