Even though separated by only a decade, the America of the 1980's seems a world away from those turbulent times known as the 1960's. We may not have overcome all the prejudices and problems of race, but we have buried Jim Crow. We may still be obsessed with our fear of Soviet expansion, but it is the Soviets who are bogged down in Afghanistan and we who are long gone from Vietnam. Yet if the 60's now appear to be so long ago and far away, they live on in the pages of Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960's, which Simon & Schuster recently reissued as a Touchstone Book [$8.95]. If Viorst examines America's recent past, Alan Crawford is much concerned with the America of today and tomorrow, his overriding concern being the rise of the "New Right" in American politics, a rise underscored by the results of the 1980 elections. Described as "a conservative journalist," Crawford wrote Thunder on the Right: The "New Right" and the Politics of Resentment last year "to sound the alarm at what he saw happening ...the abandonment of traditional conservatism for backlash politics and single-issue causes." Pantheon has published a paperback edition of Thunder on the Right, with a new introduction by liberal journalist James A. Wechsler [$3.95], Daniel J. Boorstin's The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson was originally published by Chicago in 1948 and won immediate acclaim for being, in the words of the late Richard Hofstadter, "a major contribution not only to Jefferson studies but to American intellectual history." Boorstin has written a new preface for a paperback edition of Lost World published by Chicago this spring [$6.95], When Victor G. and Brett De Bary Nee's Longtime Califom': A Documentary Study of An American Chinatown appeared in 1972, the Christian Science Monitor hailed this account of the Chinese in San Francisco as "the most vivid, essential guide for anyone who wishes to understand the experience of Chinese immigrants in America." Pantheon has added Longtime Californ' to the Pantheon Village Series, making available a paperback edition [$6.95].