Much as the Great Depression and World War II were truly global phenomena and the myriad thrilling and harrowing experiences of the 1960s hit nearly all corners of the globe, the uncertainties, instabilities, transformations, and displacement of the 1970s were not solely American in nature. An important collection edited by Niall Ferguson and three others, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, investigates the global experience of the decade in twenty-one wide-ranging essays plus an introduction and epilogue. Covering the globe and spanning many vital themes, the essays reveal the ways in which the crises that the United States faced had ramifications for the rest of the world, even as events beyond American borders helped shape the United States. The essays indicate territory as yet largely unmapped, serving as a reminder that the 1970s represent still-fertile ground for future generations of writers.
In Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia, journalist Francis Wheen provides a British perspective on the decade. Wheen covers many of the same themes as his American peers but from an angle that removes American privilege. For Wheen, “the flavour” of the 1970s “is unmistakable—a pungent mélange of existential dread and conspiratorial fever,” but one in which the resignation of Richard Nixon is not necessarily much more significant than that of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Wheen’s transatlantic treatment of the 1970s is breezy, not scholarly, but serves as a signpost of the decade’s global impact.
Thomas Borstelmann is even more expansive in his The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. As the subtitle indicates, this is a global history, far-reaching and ambitious. While so many of the books in this essay have revealed a United States growing increasingly conservative, Borstelmann’s perspective shows something quite different. His 1970s represent the triumph in many ways of a cultural and social Left and a free-market Right coming to something of a synthesis. Borstelmann sees “two powerful undercurrents,” “a spirit of egalitarianism and inclusiveness” that represented the many leftist social movements of the 1960s finally triumphing, and a “decisive turn toward free-market economics” embodied in figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Similarly, Barbara Keys, in Reclaiming American Virtue, shows how in the aftermath of the trauma of the Vietnam War, Americans on the Right and Left both embraced a restoration of American moral global leadership. Conservatives and liberals took on an increasingly human-rights-driven approach (or at least a human-rights-driven rhetorical approach) to foreign policy, though what “human rights” meant in these varying interpretations was subject to partisan interpretation.
