Today it is widely recognised that the 'long 1970s' was a decisive international transition period during which traditional, collective-oriented socio-economic interest and welfare policies were increasingly replaced by the more individually and neo-liberally oriented value policies of the post-industrial epoch. Seen from a distance of three decades, it is increasingly clear that these socio-economic and socio-cultural processes also found their expression at the level of national and international political power. The contributors to this volume explore these processes of political-cultural realignment and their social impetus in Western Europe and the Euro-Atlantic area in and around the 1970s in the context of three agenda-setting topics of international history of this period: human rights, including the impact of decolonisation; East-West détente in Europe; and transnational relations and discourses. Going beyond the so-called Americanisation processes of the immediate postwar period, this volume reclaims Europe's place – and particularly that of smaller European nations – in contemporary Western history, demonstrating Europe's contribution to transatlantic transformation processes in political culture, discourse, and power during this period.

This book explores the forces that impelled China, the world’s largest socialist state, to make massive changes in its domestic and international stance during the long 1970s. Fourteen distinguished scholars investigate the special, perhaps crucial part that the territory of Hong Kong played in encouraging and midwifing China’s relationship with the non-Communist world. The Long 1970s were the years when China moved dramatically and decisively toward much closer relations with the non-Communist world. In the late 1970s, China also embarked on major economic reforms, designed to win it great power status by the early twenty-first centuries. The volume addresses the long-term implications of China’s choices for the outcome of the Cold War and in steering the global international outlook toward free-market capitalism. Decisions made in the 1970s are key to understanding the nature and policies of the Chinese state today and the worldview of current Chinese leaders.

An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the '70s, Stayin' Alive is a wide-ranging cultural and political history that presents the decade in a whole new light. Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book - part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV lore - makes new sense of the '70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. Stayin' Alive takes us from the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the '60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. He also makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of the George McGovern campaign, between radicalism and the blue-collar backlash, and between the earthy twang of Merle Haggard's country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever. Cowie captures nothing less than the defining characteristics of a new era. Stayin' Alive is a book that will forever define a misunderstood decade.

Often considered irredeemably conservative, the US working class actually has a rich history of revolt. Rebel Rank and File uncovers the hidden story of insurgency from below against employers and union bureaucrats in the late 1960s and 1970s. From the mid-1960s to 1981, rank-and-file workers in the United States engaged in a level of sustained militancy not seen since the Great Depression and World War II. Millions participated in one of the largest strike waves in US history. There were 5,716 stoppages in 1970 alone, involving more than 3 million workers. Contract rejections, collective insubordination, sabotage, organized slowdowns, and wildcat strikes were the order of the day. Workers targeted much of their activity at union leaders, forming caucuses to fight for more democratic and combative unions that would forcefully resist the mounting offensive from employers that appeared at the end of the postwar economic boom. It was a remarkable era in the history of US class struggle, one rich in lessons for today's labor movement.

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.

No other decade evokes such contradictory images as the 1970s: reform and emancipation on the one hand, crisis and malaise on the other. In The Global 1970s: Radicalism, Reform, and Crisis, Duco Hellema portrays the 1970s as a period of global transition. Across the world, the early and mid-1970s were still years of political mobilization with everything seemingly an object of public controversy and conflict, including economic development, education, and family matters. Social movements called for the reduction of social inequalities, for participation, and the emancipation of various groups at the same time as the rise of ambitious and reform-oriented governments. Ten years later, a different world was emerging with the call for state-controlled social and economic changes in decline and new economic policies centred on liberation and deregulation taking their place. This book examines a range of explanations for this radical transformation, highlighting how economic problems, such as the oil crisis, political battles and dramatic confrontations resulted in a free-market-oriented conservatism by the end of the period. Divided into nine broadly chronological chapters and taking a global approach that allows the reader to see the familiar themes of the decade examined on an international scale, The Global 1970s is essential reading for all students and scholars of twentieth-century global history.

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.