Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States: Conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s

Description

Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States examines the unprecedented mobilization and transformation of conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic during a pivotal period in postwar history. Convinced that 'noisy minorities' had seized the agenda, conservatives in Western Europe and the United States began to project themselves under Nixon's popularized label of the 'silent majority'. The years between the early 1960s and the late 1970s witnessed the emergence of countless new political organizations that sought to defend the existing order against a perceived left-wing threat from the resurgence of a new, politically organized Christian right to the beginnings of a radicalized version of neoliberal economic policy. Bringing together research by leading international scholars, this ground-breaking volume offers a unique framework for studying the phenomenon of conservative mobilization in a comparative and transnational perspective.

Anna von der Goltz is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Her research focusses on protest movements, with a recent emphasis on responses to political, social, and cultural change among center-right students in West Germany. Her first book Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (2009) won the Wiener Library's Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson is Professor of History at Universitat Augsburg. Her main research areas are transatlantic relations, African-American studies and religious history. Her previous publications include a history of Christian Science in Germany from 1894 to 2009 (2009) and the first German Malcolm X biography (2015), as well as several co-edited collections, among them Europe and America: Cultures in Translation (2006) and The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade (2013).