For undergraduate courses in Contemporary History in the Western World.

This text is unique in that it is a guidebook to the main themes in contemporary history. It surveys the leading events, personalities, and especially trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United State and Europe, and their influences in the world at large following the Second World War. Taking the unresolved legacies of the Second World War as its point of departure, the text concentrates on the newly emeriging realities that give this era its own distinctive character, among them the worldwide influence of the consumer economy, the media revolution, the cultural reconstruction of gender relations, and the politics of the American "new world order."