front cover of American Cinema of the 1970s
American Cinema of the 1970s
Themes and Variations
Friedman, Lester D
Rutgers University Press, 2007
A smug glance at the seventies—he so-called "Me Decade"—unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics—all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. American Cinema of the 1970s, however, looks beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history.

Far from a placid era, the seventies was a decade of social upheavals. Events such as the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities, the Watergate investigations, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the American involvement in Vietnam are only a few among the many landmark occurrences that challenged the foundations of American culture. The director-driven movies of this era reflect this turmoil, experimenting with narrative structures, offering a gallery of scruffy antiheroes, and revising traditional genre conventions.

Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer,and Apocalypse Now .
[more]

front cover of Art Systems
Art Systems
Brazil and the 1970s
By Elena Shtromberg
University of Texas Press, 2016

From currency and maps to heavily censored newspapers and television programming, Art Systems explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of Brazilian dictatorship, drawing sometimes surprising connections between artistic production and broader processes of social exchange during a period of authoritarian modernization. Positioning the works beyond the prism of politics, Elena Shtromberg reveals subtle forms of subversion and critique that reinvented the artists’ political terrain.

Analyzing key examples from Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, Anna Bella Geiger, Sonia Andrade, Geraldo Mello, and others, the book offers a new framework for theorizing artistic practice. By focusing on the core economic, media, technological, and geographic conditions that circumscribed artistic production during this pivotal era, Shtromberg excavates an array of art systems that played a role in the everyday lives of Brazilians. An examination of the specific historical details of the social systems that were integrated into artistic production, this unique study showcases works that were accessed by audiences far outside the confines of artistic institutions. Proliferating during one of Brazil’s most socially and politically fraught decades, the works—spanning cartography to video art—do not conform to an easily identifiable style, form, material use, or medium. As a result of this breadth, Art Systems gives voice to the multifaceted forces at play in a unique chapter of Latin American cultural history.

[more]

front cover of Chinese Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the 1970s
Chinese Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the 1970s
Allen S. Whiting
University of Michigan Press, 1979
Chinese Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the 1970s undertakes a systematic examination of selected aspects of Peking’s foreign policy, using content analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of the media. The first study treats media images of the United States and Taiwan in 1976–77; the second analyzes domestic politics and foreign trade, 1971–1976. [1, 2]
[more]

front cover of Cities Contested
Cities Contested
Urban Politics, Heritage, and Social Movements in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s
Edited by Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, and Dieter Schott
Campus Verlag, 2017
Historians discuss the 1970s as an era of deep transformations and even structural rupture in Western societies. For the first time, Cities Contested engages in this debate from the perspective of comparative urban history, examining the struggles in and about urban space at a time when ideas about the “city” and concepts of urban planning were being reconsidered. This book discusses the structural rupture of the time by comparing case studies of Italian and Western German cities, analyzing central issues of urban politics, urban renewal and heritage, and urban protest and social movements. An original contribution to current debates on the transition from industrial modernity to post-Fordist societies as well as to urban history and the history of social movements, Cities Contested draws on the parallel histories of Italy and Germany to propose new questions and new avenues for investigation.
[more]

front cover of Contract With The Skin
Contract With The Skin
Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s
Kathy O'Dell
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

front cover of Cultures of Yusin
Cultures of Yusin
South Korea in the 1970s
Youngju Ryu, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Cultures of Yusin examines the turbulent and yet deeply formative years of Park Chung Hee’s rule in South Korea, focusing on the so-called Yusin era (1972–79). Beginning with the constitutional change that granted dictatorial powers to the president and ending with his assassination, Yusin was a period of extreme political repression coupled with widespread mobilization of the citizenry towards the statist gospel of modernization and development. While much has been written about the political and economic contours of this period, the rich complexity of its cultural production remains obscure. This edited volume brings together a wide range of scholars to explore literature, film, television, performance, music, and architecture, as well as practices of urban and financial planning, consumption, and homeownership. Examining the plural forms of culture’s relationship to state power, the authors illuminate the decade of the 1970s in South Korea and offer an essential framework for understanding contemporary Korean society. 
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Don't Look Now
British Cinema in the 1970s
Edited by Paul Newland
Intellect Books, 2010

While postwar British cinema and the British new wave have received much scholarly attention, the misunderstood period of the 1970s has been comparatively ignored. Don’t Look Now uncovers forgotten but richly rewarding films, including Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and the films of Lindsay Anderson and Barney Platts-Mills. This volume offers insight into the careers of important filmmakers and sheds light on the genres of experimental film, horror, rock and punk films, as well as representations of the black community, shifts in gender politics, and adaptations of television comedies. The contributors ask searching questions about the nature of British film culture and its relationship to popular culture, television, and the cultural underground.

[more]

front cover of From the Blue Windows
From the Blue Windows
Recollections of Life in Queenstown, Singapore, in the 1960s and 1970s
Tan Kok Yang
National University of Singapore Press, 2013
Imagine a Singapore in which flat rental was S$50 a month, a plate of noodles cost as little as 20 cents, and television broadcasts ended at 10pm every night.
 From the Blue Windows is a collection of Tan Kok Yang's memories of growing up in Queenstown back when the tallest residential building there was fourteen storeys, the Alexandra Canal flooded regularly, and wayang shows were a regular feature on Mei Ling Street. He stayed in Princess Estate, an area that was colloquially known as "the Blue Windows" because of its unique blue glass louvred windows.


With nostalgia and a sense of loss, this memoir is a personal tribute to and celebration of Queenstown and a simple but fulfilling way of life that has all but vanished from modern Singapore.
[more]

front cover of Getting Loose
Getting Loose
Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s
Sam Binkley
Duke University Press, 2007
From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Food became purer, clothing more revealing, sex more orgiastic, and home decor more rustic and authentic.

Through a sociological analysis of the countercultural print culture of the 1970s, Sam Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class. He describes the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Amateurish and rough in production quality, these popular books and magazines blended Eastern mysticism, Freudian psychology, environmental ecology, and romantic American pastoralism as they offered “expert” advice—about how to be more in touch with the natural world, how to release oneself into trusting relationships with others, and how to delve deeper into the body’s rhythms and natural sensuality. Binkley examines dozens of these publications, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Rainbook, the Catalog of Sexual Consciousness, Celery Wine, Domebook, and Getting Clear.

Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the “yuppie” 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding.

[more]

front cover of Hollywood Reborn
Hollywood Reborn
Movie Stars of the 1970s
Morrison, James
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Weary from the turbulent sixties, America entered the 1970s hoping for calm. Instead, the war in Vietnam and its troubled aftermath persisted, the Watergate scandal unfolded, and continuing social unrest at home and abroad provided the backdrop for the new decade. The scene was similar in Hollywood, as it experienced greater upheaval than at any point since the coming of sound. As the studio and star systems declined, actors had more power than ever, and because many had become fiercely politicized by the temper of the times, the movies they made were often more challenging than before. Thus, just when it might have faded out, Hollywood was reborn--but what was the nature of this rebirth?

Hollywood Reborn examines this question, with contributors focusing on many of the era's key figures — noteworthy actors such as Jane Fonda, Al Pacino, Faye Dunaway, and Warren Beatty, and unexpected artists, among them Donald Sutherland, Shelley Winters, and Divine. Each essay offers new perspectives through the lens of an important star, illuminating in the process some of the most fascinating and provocative films of the decade.
[more]

front cover of It Seemed Like Nothing Happened
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened
America in the 1970s
Peter N. Carroll
Rutgers University Press, 1990
In this unique, comprehensive history of the 1970s, we learn about international developments: the war in Cambodia, Nixon's trip to China, the oil embargo and resulting gas shortage, the Mayaquez incident, the Camp David accords, the Iranian capture of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages, the ill-fated rescue mission. All this signaled a decline in American power and influence. We also learn about domestic politics: Kent State, the Pentagon Papers, Haynsworth and Carswell, the Eagleton affair, the rise of ticket splitting, inflation, recession, unemployment, Watergate, Agnew's resignation, the Saturday night massacre, Nixon's resignation, the pardon for draft evaders, Proposition 13, the politicization of organized religion, the conservative shift in the Democratic Party, and the Reagan electoral landslide. Carroll reminds us of tragedies and occasional moments of levity, bringing up the names Patricia Hearst, George Jackson and Angela Davis, Wilbur Mills and the Argentina Firecracker, Wayne Hays and Elizabeth Ray, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone.
[more]

front cover of The Last Great American Picture Show
The Last Great American Picture Show
New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s
Edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, and Alexander Horwath
Amsterdam University Press, 2004
The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, M.A.S.H., Harold and Maude—these are only a few of the iconic films made in the United States during the 1970s. Originally considered a "lost generation," the 1970s are increasingly recognized as a crucial turning point in American filmmaking, and many films from the era have resurfaced from oblivion to become a reference for new directorial talents. The Last Great American Picture Show explores this pivotal era in American film history with a collection of essays by scholars and writers that firmly situates the decade as the time of the emergence of "New Hollywood."

Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashy, Robert Altman, and James Tobac: these legendary directors developed innovative techniques, gritty aesthetics, and a modern sensibility in American film. Here, contributors compellingly argue that the cinema of today's major directors—Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Robert Zemeckis—could not have come into existence without the groundbreaking works produced by the directors of the 1970s. A wholly engaging and long-overdue investigation of this important era in American film, The Last Great American Picture Show reveals how the films of the 1970s transformed the American social consciousness and influenced filmmaking worldwide.
[more]

front cover of Left in the Midwest
Left in the Midwest
St. Louis Progressive Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
Amanda L. Izzo
University of Missouri Press, 2023

Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy midwestern metropolis, the city and its surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of local activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, feminist social transformations, environmental protection, an end to the Vietnam War, and more. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist projects that took shape in a single midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.

In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this expansive collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. Documenting wrenching forces of metropolitan change as well as grassroots resilience, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and opportunities for the disparate groups that dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities that the future may hold for activist movements seeking change in St. Louis and beyond.
 

[more]

front cover of Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s
Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s
Jed Samer
Duke University Press, 2022
In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Jed Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.
[more]

front cover of Mabou Mines
Mabou Mines
Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s
Iris Smith Fischer
University of Michigan Press, 2012

The theater company Mabou Mines has for the past forty years created pathbreaking new theater by combining the latest concepts in music, visual arts, and technology with traditional forms of creative expression: puppetry, text, movement, theater design. From the beginning, the evanescence of performance and the dynamics of group work attracted the group. Most of their early pieces were never recorded, leaving little documentation of their foundational productions. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s provides this missing history, attempting to capture and describe the explorations of a group who set out to create indescribable performance. Iris Smith Fischer makes visible once again the celebrated company's least documented work, and offers accounts of the decisions and events that defined Mabou Mines' ideas and methods, particularly their creative collaborations with visual artists, musicians, writers, and dancers. Focusing on the heady days of the company's founding and first ten years, the book traces Mabou Mines' intellectual and artistic roots, frames them within the 1970s avant-garde, and outlines their significance in contemporary performance.

[more]

front cover of Meltdown Expected
Meltdown Expected
Crisis, Disorder, and Upheaval at the end of the 1970s
Aaron J. Leonard
Rutgers University Press, 2024
In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that “There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose.” Yet in the ensuing months, a series of crises disturbed that fragile sense of peace, ultimately setting the stage for Reagan’s decisive victory in 1980 and ushering in the final phase of the Cold War. 
 
Meltdown Expected tells the story of the power shifts from late 1978 through 1979 whose repercussions are still being felt. Iran’s revolution led to a hostage crisis while neighbouring Afghanistan became the site of a proxy war between the USSR and the US, who supplied aid to Islamic mujahideen fighters that would later form the Taliban. Meanwhile, as tragedies like the Jonestown mass suicide and the assassination of Harvey Milk captured the nation’s attention, the government quietly reasserted and expanded the FBI’s intelligence powers. Drawing from recently declassified government documents and covering everything from Three Mile Island to the rise of punk rock, Aaron J. Leonard paints a vivid portrait of a tumultuous yet pivotal time in American history. 
 
[more]

front cover of The Neoliberal Age?
The Neoliberal Age?
Britain Since the 1970s
Edited by Aled Davies, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
University College London, 2021
A new history of British neoliberalism that looks beyond right-wing actors.
 
The rise of British neoliberalism—a renewed emphasis on privatization and market-oriented economics—over the last fifty years is often characterized as the product of right-wing political economists, think tanks, and politicians. The Neoliberal Age? argues that this pat narrative ignores broader forces in British left-wing culture that collaborated to transform twentieth-century social life. Through a variety of case studies, the authors demonstrate that our austere, individualistic age emerged from more complex sociopolitical negotiations than typically described.  
 
[more]

front cover of The Politics of Trust
The Politics of Trust
Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s
Gordon E. Harvey
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Florida governor Reubin Askew memorably characterized a leader as “someone who cares enough to tell the people not merely what they want to hear, but what they need to know.” It was a surprising statement for a contemporary politician to make, and, more surprising still, it worked. In The Politics of Trust: Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s, Gordon E. Harvey traces the life and career of the man whose public service many still recall as “the Golden Age” of Florida politics.
 
Askew rose to power on a wave of “New South” leadership that hoped to advance the Democratic Party beyond the intransigent torpor of southern politics since the Civil War. He hoped to replace appeals to white supremacy with a vision of a more diverse and inclusive party. Following his election in Florida, other New South leaders such as Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, Arkansas’s Dale Bumpers, and South Carolina’s John C. West all came to power.
 
Audacious and gifted, Askew was one of six children raised by a single mother in Pensacola. As he worked his way up through the ranks of the state legislature, few in Florida except his constituents knew his name when he challenged Republic incumbent Claude R. Kirk Jr. on a populist platform promising higher corporate taxes. When he won, he inaugurated a series of reforms, including a new 5 percent corporate income tax; lower consumer, property, and school taxes; a review of penal statutes; environmental protections; higher welfare benefits; and workers’ compensation to previously uncovered migrant laborers.
 
Touting honesty, candor, and transparency, Askew dubbed his administration “government in the sunshine.” Harvey demonstrates that Askew’s success was not in spite of his penchant for bold, sometimes unpopular stances, but rather because his mix of unvarnished candor, sober ethics, and religious faith won the trust of the diverse peoples of his state.
[more]

front cover of Porno Chic and the Sex Wars
Porno Chic and the Sex Wars
American Sexual Representation in the 1970s
Carolyn Bronstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
For many Americans, the emergence of a "porno chic" culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment.

This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for new users, including women and conservative Christians. The collection also explores the rise of a culture of porn film auteurs and stars as well as the transition from film to video. As the corpus of adult ephemera of the 1970s disintegrates, much of it never to be professionally restored and archived, these essays seek to document what pornography meant to its producers and consumers at a pivotal moment.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Peter Alilunas, Gillian Frank, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nancy Semin Lingo, Laura Helen Marks, Nicholas Matte, Jennifer Christine Nash, Joe Rubin, Alex Warner, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Greg Youmans.
[more]

front cover of Reclaiming American Virtue
Reclaiming American Virtue
The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s
Barbara J. Keys
Harvard University Press, 2014

The American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma, as Barbara Keys shows in this provocative history. Reclaiming American Virtue situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America’s moral leadership.

Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate a Cold War narrative that pitted a virtuous United States against the evils of communism. Liberals sought moral cleansing by dissociating the United States from foreign malefactors, spotlighting abuses such as torture in Chile, South Korea, and other right-wing allies. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions.

Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America’s recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. It would be a small step from world’s judge to world’s policeman, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.

[more]

front cover of Rightward Bound
Rightward Bound
Making America Conservative in the 1970s
Bruce J. Schulman
Harvard University Press, 2008

Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades.

Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies.

A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.

[more]

front cover of SALT
SALT
Implications for Arms Control in the 1970s
William R. Kintner
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973

A collection of original essays dealing with many aspects of the complex problems of arms control, this volume provides an understanding of the political, strategic, technological, and bureaucratic constraints affecting the development of arms control policies by major powers. Among the diverse subjects examined are American and Soviet interests in arms control, and the rationale for arms control in alternative international systems based upon either bipolarity or multipolarity.
 
The volume also includes a discussion of the critical technological factors which have important implications for the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), an examination of structural change in the international system, the emergence of additional centers of power, and the implications of SALT for would-be nuclear powers.

Contributors:  Robert R. Bowie, J. I. Coffey, James E. Dougherty, Wynfred Joshua, Geoffrey Kemp, Takeshi Muramatsu, George H. Quester, Robert A. Scalapino, Ian Smart, William R. Van Cleave, Thomas W. Wolfe, and the editors.

[more]

front cover of The Shock of the Global
The Shock of the Global
The 1970s in Perspective
Edited by Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent
Harvard University Press, 2010

From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe, the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic “stagflation,” political scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of “globalization,” as networks of interdependence bound peoples and societies in new and original ways.

The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements. Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental protection, population control, and human rights attracted unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market revolution.

The Shock of the Global examines the large-scale structural upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first time an international system in the throes of enduring transformations.

[more]

front cover of South of Pico
South of Pico
African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
Kellie Jones
Duke University Press, 2017
Named a Best Art Book of 2017 by the New York Times and Artforum

In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond. 
[more]

front cover of Stamford '76
Stamford '76
A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s
JoeAnn Hart
University of Iowa Press, 2019
In July 1976, a twenty-four-year-old white woman, Margo Olson, was found in a shallow grave in Stamford, Connecticut, with an arrow piercing through her heart. A few weeks later, Howie Carter, her black boyfriend, was killed by the police. Howie and Margo’s interracial relationship held a distorted mirror to the author’s own, with Howie’s best friend, Joe. Joe’s theory was that the police didn’t have any evidence to arrest Howie; operating on the assumption that the black man is always guilty, they killed him instead. Margo’s murder was never solved.

Looking back at what might have happened in 1976, the author discovers a Bicentennial year steeped in recession, racism, and unrelenting violence. It was also a time of flourishing second-wave feminism, when young women were encouraged to do anything, if only they knew how. Stamford was in the midst of urban renewal, destroying historically black neighborhoods to create space for corporations escaping a bankrupt and dangerous New York City, just forty miles away. Organized crime followed the money, infiltrating Stamford at all levels. The author reveals how racism, misogyny, the economy, and corruption affected the young people’s daily lives, and helped lead Margo and Howie to their deaths.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
United States-Japanese Relations
The 1970s
Priscilla Clapp and Morton H. Halperin
Harvard University Press, 1974

"This is clearly a time of significant transition in Japanese-American relations," Edwin O. Reischauer writes in his introduction to this timely and important book. "Are the prospects as alarming as some would argue, or is there more reason for hope?"

In the penetrating essays that form this volume, the flashpoints for trouble are exposed so that we can understand the causes for the "great uneasiness" in American-Japanese relations:increasing economic rivalry, the emergence of a multipolar world, America's new interest in better relations with China and Russia, Japanese economic decline, and projected Japanese political instability.It would be easier to deal with these problems if American and Japanese cultural and political styles were similar. But they are not, and the resulting lack of communication and response is a serious handicap to solving mutual problems. In their diplomatic relations the Japanese try to avoid political confrontation and prefer to negotiate by indirection. Then, too, American images of Japan are skewed by layers of government and bureaucracy. Finally, Japanese consensus politics leads to immobility when Americans want action. The writers, in pointing out these differences, indicate how confusing all this is to U.S. policymakers.

Despite these obstacles to friendship and understanding, a "cautious optimism" about the future pervades this book. The distinguished authors suggest a variety of ways to improve relations.Japan could and should take on more responsibility for Eastern stability and economic viability. In turn, the United States ought to recognize Japan as a major power with a large stake in Asia and to stress the complementarity of their economies.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter