A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America
Hale’s second book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2011) reveals how a fascination with outsiders linked white, middle-class Americans across a variety of post-World War II cultural and political movements—including the folk music rival, the civil rights movement, the New Left, the Christian Right, and the anti-abortion movement—and enabled participants to avoid the implications of their own politics. This romance proved powerful, shes argue, because it provided a way for many white Americans to reconcile their commitment to individual self-expression and self-expansion with their desire for history and community without facing the contradictions inherent in their desires. Published by Oxford’s trade press division, this book won rare praise as a history of postwar culture liked by critics on both the right and the left, though predictably each side believed Hale was right about the other side and wrong about them. Her argument remains extremely relevant in the Trump era.
Press for A Nation of Outsiders
"A sweeping, thought-provoking study of America's postwar political and cultural counterculture...This polemic offers a refreshing take on recent cultural history." — Publishers Weekly
"Smart new study of post-1950 American rebelliousness...[A] helpful addition to our understanding of the American left." — The American Prospect
"Original and insightful study." — The Wall Street Journal
"Wide ranging and engagingly written, A Nation of Outsiders is one of the most provocative works in post-World War II U.S. history published in recent years." — Journal of American History
"In addition to telling a wealth of perceptively rendered stories, Grace Hale understands, as do few historians, that American rebels should neither be understood simply, with empathy, on their own terms nor viewed, often condescendingly, by the mainstream social order. No one before has woven these individual narratives into a larger analysis of how white middle-class rebels both rejected, in romantic ways, what they took to be established, oppressive norms while also helping to generate a more flexible, more profitable consumer society. In so doing, Hale makes A Nation of Outsiders required reading for anyone curious about the role and definition of rebellion in recent U.S. history." — Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) and American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf, 2011)
"For a nation whose history is so deeply saturated by white supremacy, Americans have paid an awful lot of attention to the disaffections of a wide array of self-proclaimed white outsiders and underdogs. Grace Elizabeth Hale provides a rich and intelligent account of how alienated — often fully aggrieved — marginality became the mainstream in post-war U.S. culture, from Holden Caulfield, the Beats, and the new minstrelsy of rock 'n' roll, to William F. Buckley and the white grievances of the Moral Majority. It's as if white Americans across the political spectrum had been rehearsing responses to the Obama presidency for two generations. This is an important book, not only for what it says about our past, but what it suggests about our present and our future as well." — Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America