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SoSe 15: The Gaze Beyond. The U.S. and the Global Challenges of the 1970s

Valeria Benko

Comments

Scholars have dealt with the complexity of post-1945 U.S. history by dividing time in decades and looking for the turning points that identify and distinguish a particular decade from adjacent ones. In the context of this identity-assigning exercise, the 1970's have had a turbulent path. Historians and observers have described the 1970's as a dark age of contemporary American society, a time of bleak economic prospects, growing inequality, “cultural anxiety and moral stagnation” (Borstelmann, 2012); the decade has been swallowed into “the long 1960's” (Simon Hall, 2008), or reduced into the incubation chamber of the 1980's (Collins, 2006). In spite of the era's ill reputation, not everyone concurs with these findings: a number of scholars have questioned these beliefs, describing the 1970's as a “pivotal decade” (Stein, 2010), an age of global change (Ferguson, Maier, Sargent and Manela, 2010), a time able to reset trends in the intellectual, social, and political realms (Rodgers, 2011). Taking advantage of the current research on the topic, this course will explore the history of the 1970's from a specific point of view, grounding the analysis at the intersection of global events and national change. A brief introduction will provide the tools to question the nature of the decade as a self contained unit, and will familiarize students with the domestic political, social and economic context. Each week we will analyze a set of events and interactions between the U.S. and the rest of the world, that raised questions on the very identity of the American republic and forced policy makers and civil society to negotiate the answers. We will focus on major moments in the 1970's history of U.S. international standing (the 1971 Nixon Shock, the 1973 and 1979 oil crises, the challenge of the Third World, the reforms of international institutions and legal regimes), as well as touch upon transnational and global issues (population control, environmental concerns, and terrorism). We will examine conflicting accounts of each of these events and main topics, as well as some of primary sources produced by an array of historical agents.Lastly, we will hold a final conclusive lecture, in which our different understandings of the 1970's, and our reflections on the junctures between past, present and future, will be made explicit and debated. The goal of the course is for students to build and own a set of factual, historiographic, and interpretive competences with which to question the consolidated knowledge about the 1970's, and reframe the relevance of contact points between the American historical trajectory and the international sphere. close