New York historian David Halberstam died is a car accident last April 23, 2007 in a car accident in California. Halberstam, winner of most every major journalistic award, including the Pulitzer Prize, was one of the few in the past thirty years to give Elvis his due in the grand scheme of history and popular culture.
In his book "The Fifties" (Villard Books, New York, 1993) he devotes almost an entire chapter to Elvis' emergence in 1956. Halberstam lays down the gauntlet right from the start:
David Halberstam wrote:
The Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which occurred in the middle of the decade, was then first important break between the older, more staid America that existed at the start of the era and the new, fast-paced, tumultuous America that saw the decade's end. The second was Elvis Presley. In cultural terms, his coming was nothing less than the start of a revolution. (p. 455).