The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
During the era that Jonathan Livingston Seagull was soaring high on self-help platitudes, the Village People were bringing a campy sensibility to the discos, and "Ms." was replacing older forms of female address, the United States, according to Schulman, was undergoing some of the most drastic and profound changes in its history. A professor of history and director of American Studies at Boston University, Schulman has fashioned a sprightly, neatly detailed and enlightening history of a period that many historians have written off as an uneventful time. While Saturday Night Live embodied the "contempt for authority" that was prevalent during the period, it was, he says, also part of a culture that "reinvented America" in ways that were deeply progressive and political. From social movements like feminism, gay liberation and the "gray panthers," to the emergence of Jimmy Carter and the politics of the sunbelt, to the startling notion of "diversity" "the prospect of unlike, unassimilable groups as a good to be valued" the 1970s altered basic concepts about the individual, race, economics, politics and society. This book's power comes from its ability to capture both the myriad contradictions as well as the cultural and political syncopations of the time. Schulman's breadth of examples from popular and political culture and his ability to use them to illuminate one another make for astute analysis as well as colorful social history.
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Review: The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And PoliticsUser Review - Jackson Burnett - Goodreads
The Seventies is written well enough to be popular history; it's researched and thoughtful enough to be a college textbook. Author Bruce Schulman claims the 1970's were more influential than the 1960 ... Read full review
Review: The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And PoliticsUser Review - Goodreads
There is so much to cover in the 70s, and Schulman does a great job at identifying how these movements were in part the disintegration of the liberal universalism ideal and the emergence of diversity as the cultural aims of different groups (women, black Americans, etc).
The Sixties and the Postwar Legacy
The Nixon Presidency
From Racial Integration to Diversity
Seeking and Finding in the Seventies
The Rise of the Sunbelt and the Reddening
Jimmy Carter and the Crisis of Confidence
Conclusion End of the Seventies End of the Century 253