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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.3 (2007) 484-485


Reviewed by
Matthew D. Lassiter
University of Michigan
America in the Seventies. Edited by Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2004) 246 pp. $35.00 cloth $16.95 paper

The cover of this collection of nine essays includes images of Archie and Edith Bunker from All in the Family, John Travolta strutting on the disco floor in Saturday Night Fever, and Farah Fawcett Majors of Charlie's Angels riding on a skateboard. Each of the contributing authors draws heavily on popular culture to illustrate political and economic transformations during an era that the editors label "our strangest decade"—still eclipsed by the drama and mythology of the 1960s, lacking "impassioned champions even among those who quite enjoyed coming of age" in 1970s America (1). Bailey and Farber's addition to the burgeoning subfield of the 1970s is representative of the extent to which the disciplines of History and American studies have become thoroughly intertwined, their boundaries almost completely blurred in much of the recent scholarship on the modern United States. In addition to making the now-expected connections between political/social history and cultural studies, the contributors also anchor the political crises and the cultural anxieties of the 1970s in the context of economic decline and capitalist restructuring, the volume's most significant contribution.

This "Age of Limits"—marked by military defeat in Vietnam, three consecutive failed presidencies, zero-sum clashes over race and gender politics, energy shortages, and economic malaise—saw the collapse of the middle-class social contract and jeopardized the broader ideology of American Exceptionalism (30). A quarter-century after Jimmy Carter's disastrous experiment in truth telling, the authors likewise diagnose an existential crisis of American identity, stretching from the national to the personal, as the defining feature of 1970s political culture. The decade theory of history is an artificial methodological trope, as much a convenient hook as a compelling framework, but the consistently high quality of the essays makes this collection an enjoyable read and a valuable resource. [End Page 484] The first half of the book is more synthetic than innovative, including chapters on political trends, racial conflict, and changing gender roles. A high point is Jefferson Cowie's incisive essay on working-class identity politics, which accords equal weight to white backlash and workplace radicalism during an era of economic scarcity that exposed the "failures of the liberal consensus" (77).

The four chapters that conclude the book are the most provocative and original. Peter Braunstein offers a superb essay on the sexual remapping of public spaces in New York City, including the technological growth of the pornography industry and the linked emergence of the gay-rights movement and the disco subculture. William Graebner portrays the existential crisis of the 1970s as the consequence of the "decline of heroism and the heroic," a role abandoned by political leaders and filled with mixed success by pop culture "survivors" such as John Travolta and Bruce Springsteen (158). Michael Nevin Willard's analysis of the "do-it-yourself" ethos of skateboarding and punk rock captures the creativity of youth subcultures that established new grassroots anti-heroes in California's postindustrial suburban wastelands. Timothy Moy's account of the young architects of the computer revolution, launching corporations such as Apple and Microsoft from their suburban basements and garages, details the breakthroughs that turned even techno-geeks such as Bill Gates into cultural icons.

The parallel rise of President Reagan, another product of the postindustrial Sunbelt, provides the narrative closure for a majority of these essays about the Age of Limits. Reagan resurrected the heroic and repudiated the existential crisis, embodying the ultimate synthesis of politics and culture.

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