I thought the author spent far too much time trying to analyze groups of people and not enough time talking about the actual events and their respective impacts. More of a psychological versus historical analysis and parts would get pretty boring.

Lived this decade. I was researching some of the aspects of Nixon's resignation and our subsequent non-support of South Vietnam. Not the detail I was looking for in Schulman. This is a popular approach to the decade. An okay starting point if you weren't there, but I'd recommend further research. I'd love to have Robert Caro tackle the decade after he finishes LBJ.

The Seventies as a decade is often written-off due to having the luck of being sandwiched in between the 60's and 80's. In fact, the 1970's often feels like how people will look at the 2000's, a time that has been defined largely by its economic crises and loss of confidence in government.

The Seventies is a odd decade for me, especially as a Liberal. It gave us some of the greatest music and movies to ever be produced. Films like The Godfather Part I and II, Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Star Wars, Halloween, Rocky, Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein & Blazing Saddles, Alien, Dawn of the Dead, and The Exorcist immediately come to mind.

Albums from artists such as Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and Bruce Springsteen would help define the decade as the rise of Punk and rise and fall of Disco occurs. Even Disco, something not entirely written off in Schulman's book has a great deal of merit. Some will immediately scoff at the idea of Disco having any merit whatsoever, but considering how people from all races and backgrounds can and did enjoy Disco, its at least worth something.

Unfortunately, the 1970s were also the death of Liberalism and the rise of the New Right as Schulman does a great job of showing. It all begins in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon as he skillfully undercuts the foundations of Liberalism and the 1970s ends with Ronald Reagan coming in to finish the job like Michael Myers out for revenge in the Halloween franchise. The "Silent Majority" and rise of the Sunbelt lashed back against Civil Rights, turned back to religion, found faith in the gospel of Wall Street and Privatization, embraced credit cards, and began finishing off unions. The chickens hatched in this decade spilled out into the "Greed is Good" 1980's and "deregulate everything" 1990's that eventually culminated in the true hedonism that culminated in the Great Recession of 2007. But I digress.

Schulman does a fantastic job of packing quite a bit in a little more than 250 pages. The Seventies is certainly well-written, well-researched, and definitely worth reading for anyone who wants a snapshot of the decade. My only real problem with the book is that it's exactly that, a snapshot, and therefore unable to capture everything worth getting in the photo or decade. However, the book is definitely picking up.

I read this book for a graduate seminar in history at UC Berkeley and really enjoyed it. It's scholarly but I found the style entertaining and easy to follow, no longer than it needed to be. Kurlansky's "1968" is also another one I recommend.

Read this in my 20th century American history class a few years ago, intend to re-read it soon in hopes of getting some ideas for my thesis. I never realized how cool 1970s history was until I read this book--I always thought the '60s were where it was at.

Surprisingly informative

I read this book for an essay I needed to write and it was honestly mind blowing to read about the seventies in a new light. I learned probably a semesters worth of work in two days.

Really good overview of the 70's - they aren't quite what you think they were.
Helps me understand my parents a bit more =)

I can't believe that I've had this book on my shelf since graduate school and only just read it. It does an excellent job establishing the relevance of the decade and arguing that although it has been dismissed as a period of irrelevant backlash, it set the stage for the contemporary political landscape. As with Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, the argument has grown with time- neither Schulman nor McGirr were writing about Trump directly, but their ideas provide a clear bridge to how we got to where we are today.

This was assigned for a class I had to drop in grad school- in the fall of 2007, and I wonder what the conversation would have been like then compared with the post 2016 conversation. I see that it was published in 2001, but I'm guessing it was published before September. I'm also very curious about how the relevance of the book changed almost immediately after it's publication. I imagine it read very differently in April than it did in November.

I love the American Studies components of this book and think it would work very well in my US Since 1945 elective- lots of opportunities to examine popular music, film, television, fashion, etc that would link directly to the argument and give students room to explore. I'll definitely use this in a future incarnation of the course.

If you've ever wantes to read about one of the most ignored decades in modern American history, this book is for you. Often, we don't consider the seventies to be one of the great decades. It lives in the shadow of the sixties, and falls short of the good times of the eighties. Yet in this book, we get to see just how important the seventies have been overall. How the attitudes of the seventies influenced the eighties, and much of the following years. This book is thorough, and perusing the notes really shows that, but it's also readable. One note is that the books publication being in 2001 means some conclusions drawn from trends started in the seventies now seem to be a bit off the mark. For instance, one might notice that south seemed to have dwindled in political power in 2008 and 2012, although it seems to have come back to full strength in 2016. In any case, there is a lot of important information here, especially how it connects to present day America, and there's a lot to dispell the myths of the seventies that were born out of the Reaganite eighties. This is certainly worth a read.