1968 WAS THE CAPSTONE OF A DECADE OF EXTREMES.

While often characterized as a time of free love, expanding sexual options, and belief in the possibility of peace and freedom, these books pull us up hard with reminders that 1968 was also marked by assassinations, riots, fears of imminent nuclear war, the generation gap, global unrest, and how America, trapped in a lingering, unwinnable war, lost its sense of invincibility. While a great cultural divide had some, including Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, calling social change activism “the shock wave of a new, frightening vision of America that was antithetical to everything the country had supposedly represented,” these books reveal that worldwide movements for change were making major strides.

1968 The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution Robert C. Cottrell, Blaine T. Browne, Rowman & Littlefield (MAY) Hardcover $38 (324pp), 978-1-5381-0775-1

Robert C. Cottrell and Blaine T. Browne’s book is a reminder that the year 1968 saw the United States on the brink of a revolution, one that was virtually apocalyptic in scope. Race riots led to torched American cities, and outrage and rebellion against the Vietnam War prompted student revolts on campuses across the land. Conspiracy trials were held in an attempt to halt the radical challenge to authority. Major political figures and other leaders were gunned down, with the images broadcast to a horrified population.

It was a time of extremes. Cottrell and Browne show how the events that shattered the belief in “US invincibility” unfolded against the backdrop of a great generational divide and global unrest, contrasted with the pull to nonviolence and peace, free love, and the rise of communal and back-to-the-land living, all topped off with a good dose of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Remembered here, the sixties also saw the second wave of the feminist movement and its more radical members’ claim that the real enemy was not war, the draft, the government, or racial issues, but men. Calls for women to rebel against patriarchy by remaining single or taking periodic sabbaticals from married life, living in all-female communes, learning karate, and practicing self-imposed celibacy resounded. And, while 1968 marked a turning point for American environmentalism with the passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers and National Trails System acts, it also saw the unveiling of some frighteningly draconian ideas on population control.

The year 1968 “added more to a sense of unease, disillusionment, and distrust of government institutions than any other year during the turbulent decade and a half that followed the start of the 1960s,” Cottrell and Browne write. But it also brought a “small but bright glimmer of hope” that continues to light the path today.

BALLOTS AND BULLETS Black Power Politics and Urban Guerrilla Warfare in 1968 Cleveland James Robenalt, Chicago Review Press (JULY) Hardcover $27.99 (384pp), 978-0-89733-703-8

As recalled in Ballots and Bullets, July 5, 1968, was a night of terror in Cleveland, Ohio. Six people were killed and at least fifteen wounded as police battled black nationalists in the beginning of days of fierce rioting. The cause is still shrouded in mystery.

James Robenalt exposes the roots of the violence in Cleveland, the first major American city to elect a black man as mayor, and one prominent in the civil rights movement. Cleveland hosted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, standing for Christian faith, nonviolence, and integration, in 1963, as well as Malcolm X and his black Muslims, who advocated for racial separation and being armed, in 1964.

The book asks some hard questions, foremost among them that of why, fifty years later, the racial divide and the neglect of inner cities is still as bad, or worse, than it was in 1968? And why does police brutality, including the murder of unarmed black citizens, go unpunished?

“Racism in America has its own peculiar pathology,” writes Robenalt, citing how Americans are in denial about the degree to which it permeates the culture, politics, economics, justice system, and relationships at all levels of society.

“The heartbreak is that in 1968 we had made a start; we had taken a first step on honestly acknowledging our nation’s racial sickness, and we at least groped for solutions,” he writes, suggesting that massive investment in the nation’s inner cities and antipoverty programs, and enforcement of gun laws and strict regulation of gun ownership, might be good places to start anew.

“We cannot expect our police to solve the problems of poverty and racism. That is a job for all Americans,” Robenalt writes, calling on all to recognize their fellow citizens as brothers and sisters and act accordingly.