Sunday, January 24, 2010

"It's the end, the end of the Seventies"...or is it?

The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It's the end, the end of the Century"
-- The Ramones

The Seventies is often dismissed as an era of leisure suits, bad hair, disco music and cheesy TV shows.  Yet, historian Bruce J. Schulman argues that these images fail to capture the era's real significance.

 Schulman gives the Seventies its due as a time period worthy of scholarly consideration.  According to popular characterizations of the 1970s, it represents nothing more than the "in-between" decade nestled between the radical 1960s and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.  The author dispels this misconception, arguing that: 
The Seventies transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than, the revolutions in manners and morals of the 1920s and 1960s.  The decade reshaped the political landscape more dramatically than the 1930s.  In race relations, religion, family life, politics and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. history, the beginning of our own time. (p. xii)
 Throughout the book, Schulman skillfully weaves together a wealth of evidence into a highly engaging analysis of the key political, cultural and economic shifts in the American landscape during this critical period of our history.  During the 1970s, the center of political and economic power shifted from the industries of the Northeast to the Sunbelt (the southern and western regions of the United States).  And, our nation has never been the same since.

As Schulman highlights, these changes brought about a "thoroughgoing southernization of American life."  Religion, especially personal expression of faith, have become commonplace in our politics and public life.  Country music, NASCAR and "a kind of wide-open libertarian boosterism" have become mainstays in our national culture.   The roots of what has come to be called the "New Right," and more recently the so-called "Teabag Movement" can be traced to the tumult of the 1970s. 

Schulman concludes:  "The long, gaudy, depressing Seventies reinvented America.  We live in their shadows." (p. 257)  For those seeking a better understanding of this transformation and the shadow it casts on us today, The Seventies is highly recommended. 

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