A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America.(Brief article)(Book review)

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America

Grace Elizabeth Hale. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-19-539313-2

Hale (Making Whiteness) explores the mainstreaming of outsider status in a sweeping, thought-provoking study of America's postwar political and cultural counterculture. Although Americans have a history of appropriating from minorities, from the 1950s on white Americans began identifying with them, imagining that "people living on the margins, without economic or political or social privilege, [possessed] something vital, some essential quality that had somehow been lost from their own lives." Like …