The trauma of war and cold war, the shattering revelation of the murder of millions of European Jews, the discovery of nuclear fission and the use of an atomic bomb on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Great Depression that threatened to return any day--these were the events that held Americans in a decade-long state of anxiety. Never before had progress seemed so fragile, history so harmful or so irrelevant, science so lethal, aggregation of power so ominous, life so full of contingencies, human relationships so tenuous, the self so frail, humankind so flawed. In this highly regarded volume Graebner examines American culture from a variety of perspectives, encompassing art, architecture, film, literature, music, dance, pop culture, and political and scientific thought. His compelling and original analysis recreates an era of anxiety and ambiguity in which Americans felt pulled inward, toward the self, and outward, toward an all-encompassing universalism, in their search for reassurance and stability.