It took a few episodes, but I’ve become hooked on Mad Men, the current TV series on the careers and private lives of hotshot advertising executives in the year 1960. It’s a series devoted to exploring the dark underside of the world of Ozzie and Harriet, and it succeeds brilliantly in its object.

Although I lived through that period, I still find myself amazed to recall that there was a time, and not so very long ago, when women stayed at home and baked cookies, when office suites were the exclusive preserve of privileged white males, where non-whites were largely invisible and where if a man was unfortunate enough to be gay, he would sooner be torn to pieces than admit it.

Watching the series, I found myself wondering what young people must make of such a world. Social differences aside, it was also a world where being high tech meant having an electric typewriter.

Mad Men skims the surface of American life before the social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. But for an exhaustive – and I mean exhaustive -- look at how much has changed over the past 40 years, I recommend a book by Leonard Steinhorn, professor of communications at American University. The book is The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (St. Martin's Press, $24.95).

I had the privilege –- and great pleasure -– of studying under Professor Steinhorn when I earned my master’s degree at American University a dozen years ago. He’s certainly one of the smartest and most decent individuals I’ve ever met.

He’s also a very thorough scholar. If you want to delve into the minutiae of how public attitudes have changed since the immediate post-World War II era, Professor Steinhorn has it all there for you, chapter and verse. In 1958, for example, the Gallup Poll reported that 94 percent of white people disapproved of marriages between whites and non-whites. A 1954 poll found that only 12 percent of Americans would allow an atheist to teach in a college or university, and 60 percent said they wouldn’t allow anyone to publicly attack religion. A 1957 study by the University of Michigan found that 80 percent of adults agreed that a woman must be sick, neurotic or immoral to remain unmarried. As for gays, even the liberal New York Times routinely referred to homosexuals as “perverts” back then.

Professor Steinhorn attributes the sea change in American attitudes between then and now to the impact of the Baby Boom generation, and it’s difficult to argue with his tsunami of statistics. Still, I have a hard time acknowledging the Baby Boomers as the “greater” generation, even though I belong to it.

I would have preferred a little more balance in Professor Steinhorn’s treatment of his subject. He makes much of the “tolerance” of the Boomers, and credits them with “asking the right questions.” I was a college student in the late 1960s, and remember vividly how student protesters shouted down speakers they disagreed with, threatened administrators with “non-negotiable” demands and then shut down the campuses by “striking” –- thus foreclosing rational discourse altogether.

Still, I have to admit that I’d rather be living in the America of today than the America than the America I see on Thursday nights when I watch Mad Men -- and social changes of such magnitude don’t come without conflict. Historians will be arguing over the significance of the Baby Boom generation for decades –- even centuries -– to come. Professor Steinhorn has made an early and valuable contribution to the debate.