At the Center completes the American Thought and Culture book series begun thirty years ago.

The series, which offers fresh syntheses of all periods of American history, saved one of its best volumes for last. At the Center is written by three distinguished historians: Casey Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick (who took over editorship of the series from Lewis Perry). Together they examine American intellectual and cultural developments at “mid-century,” defined as the years ranging from 1948 to 1963. At the Center offers a new angle on an age typically interpreted as wholly characterized by Cold War conformity too often stereotyped as “the 1950s.” Thus At the Centre challenges the convenient periodization by decades that restricts our historical understanding and which ironically is the organizing principle of many volumes in the American Thought and Culture series.

While demonstrating that American thought and culture at mid-century resist any simple characterization, the authors argue that much of them was characterized by a search for “centeredness.” This entailed “a priority on reaffirming universality, grasping essential principles, confirming foundational beliefs, identifying forces that make societies whole, creating synthesis in place of dispersion or disarray” (2). It is not that any consensus was achieved, but rather that so many sought for one. The search for foundations defined even those who dissented from it. And it united many who were otherwise sharply divided on political or philosophical grounds.

The authors argue that this centering discourse had particular appeal from 1948 to 1963 after the turbulence and horror of World War II, when the outlines of Cold War policy and domestic social policy seemed settled, at a time when the United States had taken its place at the center of world affairs, and when an ostensible equilibrium reigned prior to the explosions of social protest during the later 1960s. The period from 1948 to 1963 can thus be contrasted to an earlier twentieth-century phase defined by Morton White as a “revolt against formalism,” to the sharper conflicts in the immediate years after what Brick in another volume in this series termed an “age of contradiction,” and to a later twentieth-century one described by Daniel Rodgers as an “age of fracture.”

Though the book's argument is a powerful one, the text bursts with so much insight into a breadth of intellectual and cultural activity that many sections of it seem to have little relation to its thesis. While normally this would be a flaw, for a survey of this kind it proves one of the book's strengths. For At the Center unearths a flourishing of endeavors by a remarkable range of American intellectuals, writers, and artists. While social and political thought receive ample attention, At the Center also covers (among other things) fiction, visual arts, music both classical and popular, and architecture. Its enormous cast of characters includes figures as diverse as John Cage, Louis Cahn, Rachel Carson, Ralph Ellison, Dwight Macdonald, Margaret Mead, and Frank Sinatra. By capturing this period's vibrancy, it rescues a period often perceived as a boring interlude between World War II and “the 1960s.” For example, it argues that the culture of the period produced a “new modernism” worth engaging on its own terms rather than considering as a mere coda to modernism or precursor to postmodernism.

At the Center helps locate the discipline of American studies itself as one of the centering projects common to the period. It emerged at mid-century as an effort to define what was quintessentially “American.” The authors clearly reject efforts to search for a singular American “mind” or “character.” Yet At the Center reveals the continued value of the tradition of American studies by integrating their examination of “thought” with an analysis of “culture.”

Though At the Center offers an excellent survey, it is not aimed at audiences who have little familiarity with the period. This is not the book to read if you have barely heard of Jackson Pollock. But it is exactly the book to read if you want a succinct and original analysis of Pollock that draws on the latest scholarship. Thus, while At the Center should be assigned only at the advanced undergraduate level and above, it is required reading for all scholars who study this period.