America in the Seventies (Cultureamerica)

Book Description

Tucked between the activist Sixties and the conservative Eighties lies a largely misunderstood and still under-appreciated decade. Now nine leading scholars of postwar America offer a revealing look at the Seventies and their rightful place in the epic narrative of American history.

This is the first major work to relate the economic decline and cultural despair of the Seventies to the creative efforts that would reshape American society. Dogged by economic and political crises at home and foreign policy failures abroad, Americans responded to a growing sense of uncertainty in a variety of ways. Some explored the new freedoms promised by the social change movements of the late Sixties. Some challenged the technological verities that ruled corporate America. Others sought to create autonomous zones in the ruins of decaying cities or on the bleak landscape of anomic suburbia. And, against a backdrop of massive economic dislocation and bicentennial celebrations, many Americans struggled to redefine patriotism and the meaning of the American dream.

Focusing on how Americans made sense of their changing world by analyzing such sources as film, popular music, use of public space, advertising campaigns, and patriot rituals, these essays interweave the themes of economic transformation, identity reconfiguration, and cultural uncertainty. The contributors cover such topics as the public's increasing mistrust of government, the reshaping of working-class identity, and the tensions between the ideological and economic origins of changing gender roles.

From existential despair in popular culture to the reactions of youth subcultures, these provocative articles plot the lives of Americans struggling to redefine themselves as their nation moved into an uncertain future. Together they recapture the essence and spirit of that era--for those who lived it and for curious readers who have come of age since then and struggle to understand their own time.

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The 1960s, writes Roger Kimball, "has become less the name of a decade than a provocation." This incisive critique of that turbulent time won't calm the debate. The Long March will enthrall conservatives who think of themselves as culture warriors and infuriate liberals who still celebrate "the purple decade." Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals, is one of the Right's most articulate writers. He argues forcefully that the pernicious influence of the 1960s can still be felt: "The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation."

The Long March proceeds as a series of stimulating essays on important cultural figures and movements, beginning with the Beats. Norman Mailer comes in for an eloquent trashing ("From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania"), as do any number of counterculture icons. I.F. Stone's articles, writes Kimball, "read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers." And of The New York Review of Books, that bastion of elite liberal opinion, Kimball says: "Quite apart from the irresponsibility of the politics, there was an intellectual irresponsibility at work here, a preening, ineradicable frivolousness toward the cultural values that the journal was supposedly created to nurture." There's a distinctly conservative crankiness to Kimball's writing; the jazz of Miles Davis is inevitably "drug-inspired" and rock music "was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive." Yet this inclination can lead to fascinating, if arguable, insights about modern American culture: "Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth--that is to say, of immaturity--over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes."

Kimball's writing is at once highbrow and accessible. Fans of Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind--or readers who have never quite believed all the English professors proclaiming Allen Ginsberg a poetic genius--will find The Long March engrossing and indispensable. --John J. Miller

Book Description

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals," he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other "cultural revolutionaries" who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's "culture wars." The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

Customer Reviews:

cultural indigestion.......2007-07-08

Roger Kimball's acerbic wit and lively intellect make this book a pleasure to read. As Kimball notes, "The Sixties" is just an evocation; as a slice of history it actually encompassed nearly twenty years. "It began some time in the late 1950s and lasted at least until the mid-1970s."

It's instructive to note that the "cultural revolution" Kimball discusses coincides exactly with the period of the Vietnam War; 1959 to April 30, 1975. The cultural revolutionaries that Kimball describes were spawned by the Vietnam conflict. It was the longest war of U.S. history, over 50,000 American youth were killed, and the Army was filled with draftees; "conscripts paid to kill", as Joan Baez hauntingly lyricized. It was this combination, the war, the draft and the popular resistance to both, that provided the backdrop of the sixties principal motif, "rebellion against authority." This antipathy to authority merged with left wing ideology, which held that all of humanity should live together in a peaceful egalitarian utopia.

(Aside: Kimball commits a serious omission in that he never mentions musician and poet Bob Dylan once in his book. Dylan's lyrics, style and cultural dominance of the sixties cannot be overstated: "The Times They Are a-Changing" Also, although the Vietnam War is discussed in several places, I don't believe Kimball gives it the central place it deserves as a "permitting condition" for the cultural revolt of the sixties.)

Most of this book is spent exposing the intellectual vacuity of the revolutionaries. They were against the war but their leftist radicalism took some bizarre and twisted turns. Kimball describes the main and peripheral characters; the boorish egoist Norman Mailer, the narcissistic "intellectual poseur" Susan Sontag, the freakish sociopath Eldridge Cleaver, the fat, dumb and happy Allen Ginsberg, the drugged out Timothy Leary, the murderous Black Panthers and dozens more cultural icons who stood for nothing more than an attack on authority - all authority. (Note: epithets are mine, not Kimball's.)

The Chapter on Susan Sontag is worth the price of the book. In fact, it is priceless. Kimball takes the ideas of these cultural icons apart as easily as disassembling a cheap tinker toy set.

The most ominous theme to emerge from these hare-brained people who were going to save the world (along with saving the Viet Cong) was the antinomian view that their morality was "above the law." Yale Chaplin William Sloane Coffin Jr. and the two brothers, Priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, became carried away with their own virtue and burned draft records and helped young Americans flee to Canada. They exempted themselves from the claims of democratically established authority to pursue the calling of a "higher authority."

Civil disobedience was born. I recall seeing tee-shirts on campus emblazoned "Question All Authority." Students came to class wearing ragged war surplus clothing. In one graduate class, "The Intellectual History of America" (at a California University I attended), one student always showed up dressed only in dirty Levi's; bare-foot and shirtless. Not long after this a number of students at Berkeley started attending classes totally naked. Apparently this was their expression of a higher morality. "If it feels good, do it."

How does all this sixties turmoil effect us today? The answer lies in the universities. The students who assimilated the religion of rebellion and anti-Americanism became the professors of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Many of these academics also became University administrators. This "intelligentsia" still controls the intellectual and moral discourse at the top of the cultural heap. (David Horowitz has documented this academic dominance of radical leftists in many of his books, articles, and on his website.) Perhaps, as historian Victor Davis Hanson has put it, this intelligentsia is like a large meal ingested by a boa constrictor. It has to slowly work its way through the intestines of the giant snake until it is finally digested. Maybe the academics and administrators have reached this point; maybe they have worked their way through the labyrinth of the universities and are about to be expelled from the other end.

Kimball at his best .......2007-01-20

I love all of Roger Kimbell's books so this may not be the most unbiased review that you will read here, however...

As usual, Kimball's well rounded education shines through in this book as he uses literary and cultural examples from the soon to be extinct Western Civilization (on campus anyway.) Of all of those who have contributed their thoughts to the culture wars, Kimball has to be one of the best. Never shrill, his criticisms in `The Long March..." of such icons of the New Left as Susan Sontag, the Beats, and of course Eldridge Cleaver are well informed and backed up with ample evidence and citations.

In chapter 4, `The Liberal Capitulation', the author describes what is perhaps one of the most disgusting phenomena of the 60s, namely, college administrators siding with radical students and making deals instead of calling the authorities to deal with campus takeovers the way they should have been dealt with. I have to agree with Kimball that this was a turning point for the bad for higher education in this country - one from which we are still reeling to this day.

This is a great read for anyone interested in the culture wars and as usual, Kimball cites from enough texts to start a whole new reading list on the topic. I would not expect "progressives" out there to pick up this volume but for any open minded reader interested in the impact of 60s radicalism, this will a great addition to your library.

A necessary drop of Holy Water.......2006-11-23

"The Long March" is a very good start for anyone who wants to understand the degradation of our culture on multiple levels. The following quotes from Arthur Herman's "Joseph McCarthy (Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator)" explain the writhing & gnashing of teeth demonstrated by some reviewers:

"In fact, few conservatives saw anything new or unprecedented in McCarthy's efforts or in the hostile reaction it provoked...in the thirties, any author who attacked communism could count on a similar smear treatment..."

"...the struggle over McCarthy was part of a much longer struggle: the survival of a traditional conservatism in the face of a dominant liberal orthodoxy that seemed to find more to admire in Stalin's Russia than in it's own country's traditions."

"Two generations of American liberalism, wrote one conservative critic (of the 1950's) have called honorable men 'merchants of death' and Stalin a protagonist of human liberation; and for either misjudgment they had far less evidence than McCarthy did for his."

Yes, it's time for a deluge of Holy Water...
It's the Left, the 1960's radicals & their spawn, the red diaper babies that attempt to stifle debate...usually with labels of anti-this, anti-that, nativist, homophobe, xenophobe etc.

How?.......2006-07-27

The title of this book is: How the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties Changed America. Table of Contents:

What is a Cultural Revolution?
A Gospel of Emancipation
Norman Mailer's American Dream
Susan Sontag & the New Sensibility
The Liberal Capitulation
The Politics of Delegitimation
The Marriage of Marx & Frued
The Greening of America
The Project of Rejuvenilization
Eldridge Cleaver's Serial Extremism
A Nostalgia for Molotovs
What the Sixties Wrought

Kimball emphasizes the importance of colleges admitting unqualified persons, especially at a time when violent takeovers, protests and hostage-taking had become fashionable on campuses. The faith was that education could transform people. But people resent charity by whatever name it is called, and people resent having to compete with other people who are better qualified than they are. Violent protests were an easy and predictable way out. So was the demand for separate academic programs, separate grading systems, and ultimately a substitution of different content in all courses (thus eliminating the need to compete). This started as early as 1969 at Cornell. And as more and more minorities and other "victim" groups were given a free ride into the universities, more of them demanded separate academic programs, separate standards of grading, separate rules of conduct. And whatever they demanded, of course, they got. And as these special subjects became fashionable in the 1970s, the majority (white) students demanded that their courses reflect these trendy topics.

Kimball quotes Nathan Glazer who says we "can only admire the public-relations skill exhibited in the choice of a name" for their various actions (p. 106). That skill has since become a fine art, as reverse discrimination/charity has been christened "affirmative action", revolution has been re-christened "transformation", rejection of and denigration of Western culture has been dubbed "multiculturalism" and more recently "diversity".

Again, the title of this book is: How the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties Changed America. This book does describe a number of changes in America since the 1960s, but does not say HOW these changes were accomplished (undoubtedly because Kimball was not there).

For a more thorough and accurate account from an independent point of view, read the new While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within. In spite of the provocative title, this is a thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned book which nonetheless does not shrink from carrying the evidence to its logical conclusions.

Disappointing; the book stops short of its promise.......2006-05-31

While I agree that the 60s epitomize 12-18 years of self-indulgence, excess, moral decay, and rationalization, I found this book failed substantially to go from a cataloguing of horribles to a clear analysis of precisely how pervasively the perpetuation and idolization of these misguided ideals continue to undermine society.

The book promises just such an examination in its subtitle: "How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," but falls far short of delivering on that promise.

Mr. Kimball's abrasive (though, IMHO, accurate) portayals of the icons of the revolution should be only one part of the book, but he fails to take it the rest of the way and go beyond his earlier essays assailing each of these malcontents.

A tough read, and definately not worth it.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America

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Rambling and Misdirected
I laughed out loud and I learned some things

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
Andreas Killen
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1596910593
Release Date: 2006-04-04

Book Description

An engaging and eye-opening dissection of a watershed year in American history.

Tumultuous and exciting, 1973 marked the end of the 1960s and the birth of a new cultural sensibility. A year of shattering political crisis, 1973 was defined by defeat in Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, the oil crisis and the Watergate hearings. It was also a year of remarkable creative ferment. From landmark movies such as The Exorcist, Mean Streets, and American Graffiti to seminal books such as Fear of Flying and Gravity’s Rainbow, from the proto-punk band the New York Dolls to the first ever reality TV show, The American Family, the cultural artifacts of the year testify to a nation in the middle of a serious identity crisis.

1973 Nervous Breakdown offers a fever chart of a year of uncertainty, fragility, and change, a year in which post-war prosperity crumbles and modernism gives way to postmodernism. Killen ransacks newspapers, magazines, novels, films, TV shows and music to bring to life traumatic events. The fate of the family, the future of the presidency, the sanity of the masses—all of these bedrocks of society are threatened. 1973 marks the pivotal year of a decade whose impact on our own cultural zeitgeist remains considerable—a decade in sore need of liberation both from the long shadow of the 1960s and from the backwards shadow cast by the 1980s. With this book, Andreas Killen offers a lively and revelatory analysis of one of the most important periods in the second half of the 20th century.

Customer Reviews:

Rambling and Misdirected.......2006-12-31

1973 was a seminal year in US history, and Andreas Killen (City College of New York history professor), correctly identifies it as such in his book. Some of the more interesting sections of his book deal with the end of the war in Vietnam and the return of the POWs, Watergate, and the legitimate questions about Nixon's psychological health. He includes a lot of seemingly adulatory material on Andy Warhol and the transvestite punk-rock culture. In a boring and overlong chapter, Killen spends a great deal of time ruminating about how important the Loud family was in their TV show, The American Family. Killen's writing style is strained throughout the book, and his sentence structure is overly complex and sometimes disjointed.

I felt Prof. Killen should have heavily edited the sections on The American Family and the drug hazed Warholites. In wallowing about the forgotten movies of the midseventies and breathlessly praising the Hollywood directors of that year, he overstates the importance of these entertainers and seems to think they were cataclysmic contributors to US history. This sort of attitude is embraced today by the People magazine culture, uninterested in reading anything more than a caption under a celebrity's photograph. Instead of giggling about the New York Dolls, where's a mention of Led Zeppelin or Dark Side of the Moon (which came out that year)?

In getting caught up in how wonderful American Graffiti and Francis Ford Coppola are, Killen grossly under-represents or fails to mention Roe v. Wade, the downing of Libyan Airlines Flight 114, Nixon's visit to China, the showdown at Wounded Knee, the founding (and reasons for the founding) of the DEA, the conclusion of the Thalidomide class action suit, the Houston Mass Murders, the Saturday Night Massacre, and the APA's belated removal of homosexuality from the DSM. What was happening in the art world at that time, or in classical music?

Prof. Killen's main idea was right--1973 was an important year, and maybe it did represent the death of the Sixties and the birth of a neurotic, conspiracy-minded era in modern US history. However, he overemphasizes the above-mentioned subjects and too narrowly defines the important events of that year.

I laughed out loud and I learned some things.......2006-06-09

I really enjoyed this book! After years of thinking about the 1970's as political and cultural deadweight, I was surprised to discover how significant the 1970's were in shaping our current social and political landscape. I was captivated by the ways that Killen wove together seemingly disparate events and themes. His writing is both smart and accessible. I laughed out loud and I learned some things, which is strong praise in my book. I highly recommend this book and I can't wait for the sequel. 1984 anyone?

Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's

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Wonderful Book Of Essays On The Counterculture!
A HAPPENING - Bittersweet Adolescence of a Nation

Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960's and 70's
P. Braunstein
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415930405

Book Description

The counterculture of the 1960s and '70s remains a highly controversial topic in American society; virtually the only thing that can be agreed upon is its enormous impact on American life. Critics on the right complain of the shattering of cherished social norms, while those on the left take many movements to task for not going far enough and selling out.
Amidst the recent flourishing of Sixties scholarship, Imagine Nation is the first collection of essays to focus solely on the counterculture. Its fourteen provocative essays seek to unearth the complexity and rediscover the society-changing power of significant movements and figures. The fascinating constellation of topics covered include feminism, psychedelic drug experimentation, guerilla theatre, the New Left, Jimi Hendrix, communal living, underground comics, and avant-garde film. As a whole, Imagine Nation offers exciting new interpretations of how the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s irrevocably altered American society.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful Book Of Essays On The Counterculture!.......2004-01-15

One of the most fascinating artifacts arising in the midst of the turbulent 1960s was the creation and promulgation of a new subculture in the shadow of the mainstream material culture, one that had quite different aspects to its lifestyle, including a different set of predominating social, economic and political perspectives, experiences, and perspectives. In the main the thrust of the counterculture, as it came to be known, was a rabid rejection of the ethos, perspectives, and behaviors of the mainstream culture, including its meaningless materialism, its warlike nature, and its xenophobia about anyone different. In this terrific book edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, we are presented with fourteen wonderful essays written by scholarly eyewitnesses to the phenomenon.

These are arranged into several sections according to chapters dealing with popular culture, the media, the use of drugs to free oneself of predominating cultural baggage, social and cultural politics, and race, sex, and communal issues. Each of the sections is prefaced with a brief but integrating essay that helps immeasurably to both connect the subject of each chapter to the rest of the welter of considerations concerning the counterculture, and to help to explain various aspects concerning themes with the subject itself. The editors aid the overall effort by stitching together such important elements as the predominating "geist' or worldview of the members of the counterculture that helps to better locate them both historically and culturally within the particular and relatively brief moment in time that enveloped the counterculture itself. Yet another scholarly aspect of the book that makes it worthwhile is its extensive footnoting, which provocatively slows the reader down to enjoy the depth of the ride as well as to invite the reader in the direction of further reading and cogitation.

The opening section of the book is comprised of a wonderful essay that both locates the fourteen other essays in terms of the popular philosophy that so actively fueled the movement away from the predominating mainstream material culture, and points out how beneficial further historical analysis would be to further explicate the ways in which the sudden explosion of the counterculture onto the social scene in the late 1960s actively changed the society and continue to influence it today. This is a we'll-written and entertaining read that helps the reader to understand what other authors have simply explained away as being nothing more than "Sex, drugs, and rock and roll". For those of us who lived through it, it was so much more, and this book gives one a glimpse of everything the counterculture was, and all that it aspired unsuccessfully to become. Enjoy!

A HAPPENING - Bittersweet Adolescence of a Nation.......2002-07-25

This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent essays demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject.

Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle, "...hippies, freaks, Flower Children, urban guerillas, orphans of Amerikka - underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages, the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.

"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "...a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful...it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don't believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the '60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all-encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.

"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived - peaceful, generous, honorable - did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "...morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying."

Against the climate of the VietNam war and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post-scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "...live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society.

The San Francisco Diggers' motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers, the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, concerts, free [open]churches, and free stores with food, clothes and household utensils - all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and in public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable," said JFK, and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn't WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."

Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance of the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "...lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice"...LSD and other mind-expanding drugs "...incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierachcies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "...an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates."

My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria's "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it's not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria's sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. It was written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented Indians without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.

"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "...had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "...people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless."

In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "...enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from I to we. It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."

Miller's essay segues nicely into the last - on alternative technolgy, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller's geodescic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "...composting toilets, afforadble greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don't forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass.

It's not that there were no mistakes, ineptitudes and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the '60s and '70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We're still out there. Here. Hippies didn't disappear and they didn't become corporate CEO's either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social works and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.

"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced."

Customer Reviews:

A manageable approach for introducing the 1970s........2003-02-25

Books in the "American Decade Series" are designed to give its readers a glimpse of American history decade by decade. "The 1970s" is no exception. Historians often balk at the amateurish approach of presenting history decades by decade. While this approach may be somewhat simplistic, it can serve as an excellent teaching method for introducing new material to students.

"The 1970s" starts with a well rounded introduction, it then presents its thirty essays, or chapters from other books, on various issues prevalent in the 1970s. These topics are further broken down into international issues in the 1970s, national issues in the 1970s, environment, energy, and automobiles in the 1970s, popular culture in the 1970s, women's issues in the 1970s and from the 1970s into the future. The makeup and selection serves as a well-balanced approach to understanding the decade. No particular area is over represented. Each essay includes a brief bio of the writer. Additionally, the book is well served with an excellent chronology of events, recommendations for further study and an index. At 320 pages, "The 1970s" is a good choice for honor students in high school or possible a good textbook for a college level course on 20th century America.

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DON'T MISS THIS BOOK!!

Death on horseback;: Seventy years of war for the American West
Paul Iselin Wellman
Manufacturer: J.B Lippincott Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0007E4FYQ

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DON'T MISS THIS BOOK!!.......2006-02-10

THIS IS A FABULOUS READ! FULL OF LITTLE KNOWN FACTS, INTERESTING FOOTNOTES, HEARTBREAKING HEROISM ON BOTH SIDES, ACTS OF COMPLETELY UNBELEIVABLE ENDURANCE (206 TO 213).

If you like the Indian war history you have to read this. I bet you read it over and over again! IT WILL BRING A TEAR TO THE EYE!
Dave

The Oldest Gay Couple in America: A Seventy-Year Journey Through Same-Sex America

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The Oldest Gay Couple in America; a perspective
Let There Be Love
A rare look at an honest relationship... I cried

The Oldest Gay Couple in America: A Seventy-Year Journey Through Same-Sex America
Gean Harwood
Manufacturer: Birch Lane Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Oldest Gay Couple in America; a perspective.......2002-06-30

I have just finished reading this book, "The Oldest Gay Couple in America".

Having just celebrated a forty year committed relationship with my partner, I found much in this book that parallels our own experience in the past forty years. While these people were in New York City and involved with a professional life that in no way resembles our own, there were many instances which were remarkably similar to the experiences we have had. Regardless of the environment in which we live, the human element remains the same for all of us and the difficulties and rejection we all learned to experience and cope with are as painful and damaging for the more ordinary of us as for Bruhs and Gean. An outstanding account of love and devotion through agonizing times, it often brought both laughter and tears and was a privilege to be able to read, recommded by a good friend. Thank you for publishing it and making it available to the rest of us.

Let There Be Love.......2000-05-28

Included in Harwood's conversational memoir is first and foremost a love story of two men who lived lives as a couple before there was gay liberation, yet lived to see gay liberation come to be. Not that their lives weren't gay all along! The parties, the celebrities and the "love that dare not speak its name" mentality of America from the Depression through WWII to today. Harwood has also given us a clear insider's look of New York history, the arts and culture of several decades (with an emphasis on dance), and how the lack of money put strains on all human relationships. But what is most wonderful in Harwood's enchanting autobiography is his portrait of how all couples, gay or straight, face the same challenges, the same questions of what a relationship means, and how individuals must adjust to each other in sickness and in health through 70 years of living together. The entire story makes for entirely fascinating reading and will remain one of the best gay memoirs and gay history books available for years to come.

A rare look at an honest relationship... I cried.......1999-01-16

One can feel the love, fear, fun, and sorrow that Gean and Bruhs experienced through their lives. This was a truly heart-warming book. It strengthened my feelings for my 10-year relationship with my partner and gave me an insight to gay life "before my time". This is a great book for romantics dreaming of that illusive long-time companion. It proves it can be done!

Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration From America's Favorite Magazine

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Covers of the Saturday Evening Post
The covers of Middle America's house journal

Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration From America's Favorite Magazine
Jan Cohn
Manufacturer: Studio
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

General | Drawing | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Journalism | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books

Media Studies | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0670849626

Customer Reviews:

Covers of the Saturday Evening Post.......2007-09-10

Fabulous Book - and what a joy to have reproductions of all the covers in one place - it would be impossible to collect them all. Congratulations to Jan Cohn on a marvelous work.

The covers of Middle America's house journal.......2001-10-21

I have given this book four stars instead of five because it really should have come with a magnifying glass. There are over 3500 covers (in color) from the start of the last century and they are all one and a half inches by two inches, actually they could have been a bit bigger by reducing the generous margins round each cover.

Despite the small size there is plenty to enjoy in this well printed book. All the Rockwell's and Leyendecker's are here and into the forties and fifties you can follow Albert Staele's cover paintings of his spaniel Butch, or the regular winter snow scene covers painted by John Clymer. My favourite is Stevan Dohanos, he seemed to delight in cramming in as much detail as possible offering reader's a reassurance of the familiar and everday. Some publisher should do a book of his Post covers.

I was interested to see the covers of the short lived new look Post from September 61 to June 62, these were created by the famous designer Herb Lubalin but his efforts did not impress Middle America and the cover and inside look returned to the regular style. I always thought they looked great and I would love to have these 37 issues in my Post collection (send me an email if you have them)

From late 1962 the Post covers were almost all photographic, just like any other mass market magazine and the last weekly issue came out on February 8 1969. This book is a visual record of a unique American publication, just have your magnifying glass handy to enjoy the experience.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Touring America Seventy-Five Years Ago: How the Automobile and the Railroad Changed the Nation : Chronicles from National Geographic (Cultural & Geographical ... Series/Chronicles from National Geographic)

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Touring America Seventy-Five Years Ago: How the Automobile and the Railroad Changed the Nation : Chronicles from National Geographic (Cultural & Geographical ... Series/Chronicles from National Geographic)
National Geographic Society (U. S.)
Manufacturer: Chelsea House Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

Photojournalism | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Travel | People & Places | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Ages 9-12 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

Travel | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books

North America | Travel | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 079105098X

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