Risen, Clay. A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009. xii + 292 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

Nineteen sixty-eight is often viewed as a watershed year. As in the definition of watershed, two different bodies of water reached a shared destination, compelled there by the draining created by a ridge of land. In this instant, one body of water is American foreign policy and the other body of water is American civil rights--especially as the concept was being enlarged to include serious socioeconomic change for the poorest people regardless of their color. The common destination was a retrenchment, an acceptance of limits both in stopping Communism and in overcoming poverty, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had asked poignantly of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, can the United States win the war in the jungles of Vietnam and in the streets of Detroit? The answer given by 1968 was: Neither can be won, and furthermore, neither should be fought anymore.

In his epochal Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (2003), Jeremy Avril Suri marks it with something like celebration that student protest throughout the world's university centers--protests propelled by violent resistance rather than...