Today is the official release date for my new book, The Age of Abundance. In it I offer a new interpretation of American history since World War II – one that focuses on the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disorienting social changes triggered by the advent and deepening of mass prosperity. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a “creative class” of “knowledge workers,” the decline of machine politics and the mad proliferation of subcultures and lifestyles – all, in my telling, are the progeny of economic abundance. Furthermore, I argue that the upshot of all these changes is a much more libertarian America, although politics has not yet caught up to the new social reality.

I’ve also started up a weblog, www.brinklindsey.com, as a companion site for the book. The idea is to comb the Internet’s massive historical archives for materials and imagery that relate to the book’s themes. Check it out!