"Though protest and lobbying played a role in bringing about new laws and regulations - touching everything from wheelchair access to women's athletics to bilingual education - what Skrentny describes was not primarily a bottom-up story of radical confrontation. Rather, elites often led the way, and some of the most prominent advocates for expanding civil rights were conservative republicans who later emerged as these policies' most vociferous opponents.

This book traces the minority rights revolution back to its roots in the aftermath of World War II, in which a world consensus on equal rights emerged from the Allies' triumph over the oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. Skrentny also contrasts the failure of white ethnics and gays and lesbians to secure minority rights with groups that were successfully categorized with African Americans by the government.

Investigating these links, Skrentny is able to present the world as America's leaders saw it, and thus to show how and why familiar figures - such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and, remarkably enough, conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater and Robert Bork - created and advanced policies that have made the country more egalitarian but left it perhaps as divided as ever."--BOOK JACKET.