Whereas Peter Carroll cheekily titled his classic 1982 account of 1970s America It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, the emergent historiographic consensus on that decade not only claims that, in fact, “something happened,” the title of Edward Berkowitz’s overview of the 1970s, but that it was a “pivotal decade,” the title of Judith Stein’s new book on deindustrialization. Central to this new historiographic consensus is another area of wide agreement: that the 1970s were a crucial decade for conservative political transformation; that the 1970s signaled the beginning of the end of the New Deal Order. This thesis is pondered at length Read more