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Instructors: Torsten Kathke
Event type:
Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.210
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Requirements / organisational issues:
Seminar 210: Diffident Decade – The United States in the 1970s
For a long time, the history of the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by scholarly interest in “the Sixties” – as a decade in which major shifts occurred as well as as a cultural phenomenon. The 1970s, the decade that followed the exciting 1960s, in contrast, was often seen as little more than their aftermath, or the lead-up to developments better espoused by the 1980s.
Over the past two decades, however, interest in the 1970s as an important time of change in which the foundations for the rest of the century and even the present moment were laid, has sprung into focus. Variously, historians have wondered about the many differing impulses of the decade. Not for nothing are two major works on the decade contrastingly called “Something Happened” (Edward D. Berkowitz) and “It Seemed Like Nothing Happened” (Peter N. Carroll). Both sentiments describe a diffident decade, in which crisis was a mode of public consciousness as well as a constant threat, and in which hopes for the future were always intertwined with looming dystopias.
As the United States became, for the first time in its history, a multiracial liberal democracy, a backlash against civil rights was taking shape, however, and as the period of post-war boom ended, economic uncertainty, poverty, and a neoliberal politics that prioritized the individual above community and society was beginning to take hold.
This history class casts "the 1970s" as a "long" decade from the late 1960s and into the early 1980s. It analyzes the multiple crises, real and imagined, that threatened the United States during the era, and takes a close look at its government, culture, and economy during what Bruce Schulman has called a "great shift in American Culture, society, and politics."
Digital teaching:
An LMS/Moodle site will be an essential component of this class.
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