Isserman is regarded as an expert on the 20th-century U.S. history and is widely acknowledged to be one of the preeminent historians of the 1960s. According to the former Fulbright grant-winner and expert on reform and radical movements, "the 1960s are often characterized as a decade of free love, drug abuse and rock and roll. Although marijuana, LSD and casual sex were prevalent in this era, these images often overshadow the true defining characteristics of the decade; the social, cultural and political uprising in the U.S."
Isserman argues that the conflict of the '60s continues to affect today's politics. He points out that many conservatives have attributed the liberal "self-indulgent" attitudes of President Clinton to the counterculture of the '60s, while the first lady's charges of a "right-wing conspiracy" reveal that even today remnants of the ideological clashes of the 1960s remain in our political and social culture.
According to Isserman the 1960s represented a "second Civil War" in America. It was "a time of intense conflict and millennial expectations, similar in many respects to the one Americans endured a century earlier – with results as mixed, ambiguous, and frustrating as those produced by the Civil War," says Isserman. "Many Americans came to regard groups of fellow countrymen as enemies with whom they were engaged in a struggle for the nation's very soul. Whites versus blacks, liberals verses conservatives, young versus old, men versus women, hawks versus doves, rich versus poor, taxpayers versus welfare recipients, the religious versus the secular, the hip versus the straight, the gay versus the straight."
"As the end of the millennium nears we can see, that while there remains a continuing debate among activists, intellectuals and politicians over the meaning of the 1960s, no other era in the twentieth-century has had as great an impact on our current society," says Isserman. The clashes between liberals and conservatives brought about vast social and cultural changes that are still prominent today. Isserman has authored many books including If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (1987). In addition, he has written articles and book reviews for The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post. His co-author, Michael Kazin, is a professor of history at Georgetown University, and has written The Populist Persuasion: An American History (1998) and Barons of Labor (1989).
