May aims to demonstrate that, over the past fifty years or more, there has emerged a “new consensus” that Americans have everything to fear—especially from each other—despite the fact that in very many ways their world has grown safer.
Friedman’s skill in populating her chapters with not only intriguing protagonists but a full cast of supporting characters results in an engrossingly textured account of the early Cold War. Freeing the era from the straightjacket of conformity to which it has been confined by hindsight and historiography, Citizenship in Cold War America reveals a society more fractious than anxious.