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The 1970s : a new global history from civil rights to economic inequality
This title looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. The author creates a framework for understanding the 1970s and its legacy.
Book
The 1970s
The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more--and less--equal.
eBook
The Cold War and the color line : American race relations in the global arena
After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation's leaders with an embarrassing contradiction.
Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America's closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anticommunist alliance. At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle.
The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths—Southern Africa and the American South—as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.
eBook
The 1970s
The 1970slooks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more--and less--equal.
Borstelmann explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America. Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the movement for civil rights grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. And developments were not limited to the United States. Many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China.
Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective,The 1970sshows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations upon American society and the broader world that continue to resonate today.
eBook
THE SPREAD OF MARKET VALUES
“This is like 1931,” long-time socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington wrote in 1978. “Just as the conventional wisdom of the 1920s was totally shattered by the depression, the conventional wisdom of the 1960s has been shattered by inflation.” Economic growth had defined human history for two hundred years, reaching a peak in the generation after 1945 when world economic growth averaged an extraordinary 5–7 percent per year. Americans rode that growth to a higher standard of living than anyone else. But in the 1970s it all seemed to be flowing away. Unemployment, oil shortages, a plunging stock market,
Book Chapter
THE RISING TIDE OF EQUALITY AND DEMOCRATIC REFORM
“Good morning, boys and girls!” This greeting has rung out in elementary school classrooms throughout the United States for generations. Almost no one objects. After all, sex is a biological reality. The children are boys and girls. It seems natural to call them that. But is it really natural? Children can also be categorized in many other ways using different criteria. “Good morning, tall kids and short kids!” would surely raise some eyebrows. Why call attention to people’s height, another clear biological difference? “Good morning, blacks and whites!” is unimaginable, a visible distinction freighted with an invidious past that few
Book Chapter
THE RETREAT OF EMPIRES AND THE GLOBAL ADVANCE OF THE MARKET
Across the political spectrum, Americans tend to think of their country and their history as exceptional. From the fortuitous geographical buffer of two vast oceans to a founding Constitution that emphasized liberty, from a robust base of natural resources to regular inflows of industrious immigrants, the United States has appeared to most of its citizens and to many foreign observers as a land uniquely blessed with wealth and freedom. But the American story is not separate from the larger narrative of world history. Historians of U.S. foreign relations have long made this point, and other historians of the United States
Book Chapter
CROSSCURRENTS OF CRISIS IN 1970S AMERICA
Big trouble splashed into most Americans’ lives in the 1970s. Few symbols embodied this as fully as the 25-foot great white shark that rose from the murky depths to devour swimmers and terrorize a Long Island beach town in the blockbuster movie,Jaws. The film opened on June 20, 1975, after an unprecedented television advertising campaign, and quickly became the first movie to earn over $100 million, the model for future summer blockbusters, and one of the two most popular films of the decade (along with 1977’sStar Wars).Jawsspawned a series of spoofs and parodies, including a towering
Book Chapter
RESISTANCE TO THE NEW HYPER-INDIVIDUALISM
Not everyone found comfort in the increasingly though not fully entwined enthusiasms for greater human equality and the marketplace that took shape in the 1970s. An unfettered individualism, with all progressively more welcome to participate as autonomous buyers and sellers, was emerging as the central feature of contemporary American culture and gaining traction around the globe, but it deeply troubled certain observers. Some of the objections came from predictable if diverse corners. Socialist revolutionaries from Vietnam to Angola to Nicaragua, for example, saluted equality, at least in principle, but rejected the market and restricted private property. They fought for a
Book Chapter