Over the last decade or so, scholars have refocused attention on the history of the United States in the 1950s. Perhaps they are intrigued by the façade of unity in postwar U.S. society that disguised intense anxieties about domestic and international conflict. Or maybe they see in the 1950s the seeds of present day conceptions of national identity, in which American exceptionalism is invoked to justify numerous controversial policies. The author of Music in the Age of Anxiety, musicologist James Wierzbicki, speculates in his book's epilogue that U.S. citizens may have become fascinated with the 1950s after 9/11 because their country was once again at war with a “mysterious foreign enemy,” enduring an unusual degree of government surveillance, and witnessing extensive international military engagement (p. 203). Maybe we can learn more about our own “age of anxiety” by studying the 1950s.

Wierzbicki's ambitious study considers how American music was...

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