On 4 July 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighbourhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, rioting and the blowback of a “silent majority” mobilised by an emerging right, left a fragmented political landscape.

Kevin Boyle’s full-dimensioned history of the decade is authoritative and engrossing. The civil rights movement emerges from the grassroots activism of Montgomery, through the tragic violence of Birmingham, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign and a rising Black nationalism. The Vietnam war unfolds as misguided policy, high-stakes politics and searing in-country experience. Women’s challenges of gender norms yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, contraception and abortion.

With empathy its keynote, this definitive history of the 1960s recovers the humanity behind the decade’s divisions.