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Matthew D. Tribbe, Neil M. Maher. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 261–262, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.261
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Extract
Although the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 was one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century, academic historians have done relatively little to situate it in its broader post–World War II context. Neil M. Maher, in Apollo in the Age of Aquarius, hopes to establish the landing’s centrality to what he calls the “mainstream American history” (6, 8) of the long 1960s by examining “the shared history of the space race and the social and political movements of the 1960s era” (2). What, Maher wonders, would “the Sixties” look like if we reconsidered common topics that have shaped our understanding of the period—specifically, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the New Left antiwar movement, environmentalism, feminism, the counterculture, and the New Right—via their relationships with a space program that as much as any of these issues dominated the headlines of the period? The result is a novel approach to the era that offers new and valuable insights into all of these topics.
