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Passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge. A young girl walking by a marquee advertising Deep Throat in the made-for-TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. A frustrated housewife borrowing Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Commercial television of the 1970s was awash with references to sex. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, significant changes were rippling through American culture. In representing—or not representing—those changes, broadcast television provided a crucial forum through which Americans alternately accepted and contested momentous shifts in sexual mores, identities, and practices.

Wallowing in Sex is a lively analysis of the key role of commercial television in the new sexual culture of the 1970s. Elana Levine explores sex-themed made-for-TV movies; female sex symbols such as the stars of Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman; the innuendo-driven humor of variety shows (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Laugh-In), sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company), and game shows (Match Game); and the proliferation of rape plots in daytime soap operas. She also uncovers those sexual topics that were barred from the airwaves. Along with program content, Levine examines the economic motivations of the television industry, the television production process, regulation by the government and the tv industry, and audience responses. She demonstrates that the new sexual culture of 1970s television was a product of negotiation between producers, executives, advertisers, censors, audiences, performers, activists, and many others. Ultimately, 1970s television legitimized some of the sexual revolution’s most significant gains while minimizing its more radical impulses.

War in Modern US History: A Transatlantic Perspective brings together scholars based primarily in Europe to reconsider the place of war in the modern history of the United States. Although war has been central to the making of US power and global influence, the study of war and the military has often remained fragmented across subfields: military history, diplomatic history, cultural history, social history, American studies, sociology, and political science. This volume argues that a transatlantic and interdisciplinary perspective offers a particularly productive vantage point from which to rethink these divisions. The book approaches war not as a narrowly defined set of military actions but as a “total social act” whose effects extend across political institutions, social hierarchies, cultural representations, technologies, memory, gender, welfare, and everyday life. Its chapters range from the Civil War to the post-9/11 era and examine subjects including military occupation in Tennessee during the Civil War, nuclear communication during the Cold War, World War II intelligence, Cold War role-playing games, military spouses, disabled veterans, US military reform, and the afterlives of American bases in France. Together, they show how the boundaries between war and peace, military and civilian life, domestic and foreign policy, and national and transnational history have been constructed, blurred, and contested over time. By foregrounding the work of scholars trained in differing European academic contexts, the collection also highlights the value of looking at US history from the outside. This perspective challenges assumptions of American exceptionalism, brings US military history into dialogue with European and global historiographies of war, and encourages a broader understanding of the field. With an afterword by Beth Bailey, the volume speaks to scholars interested in the fields of US history, military history, war and society, and American studies and in the global and transnational dimensions of US power. Contributors Beth Bailey Olivier Burtin Malcolm Craig Anne-Lise Dall’Agnola François Doppler-Speranza Lucie Genay Katharina Gerund Andrew Houck Johannes Nagel Hélène Solot Simona Tobia