Increasing divorce rates drug use and crime. From the american historical Associations Annual meeting last month in new york city this is two hours. Welcome, everybody, to todays panel on the crises of the 1970s. So we have a great panel today and i im going to just start out by talking a little bit about what we thought how we kind of framed this panel and what we are kind of hoping to accomplish. One of the things we have set this up as a round table intentionally. All of us were going to speak for maybe about ten minutes, so kind of making a few brief remarks about the literature on the 1970s and thinking you about the 1970s, what this unique time means to us today and then we would like to open it up and have a lot of time for conversation, both among both with each other and most importantly, with the audience. So we are going to be sticking to a pretty, you know pretty tight time and hopefully having a lot of time for conversation. So, one of the things that we were thinking abou
So, one of the things that we were thinking about in setting up this panel is the central role of the idea of crisis in thinking you about the 1970s, both in the contemporary political imagination of the time and also in historical scholarship. From water bait to the Energy Crisis, the urban crisis the fiscal crisis, the rhetoric of the era is infused with this sense of danger and awareness of historical change. And histories of the decade, too, often treat it in these kind of heightened terms. Theres as many people have observed, the period of 1970s has gone from being easily dismissed historical footnote or a kind of punchline of some sort to being sort of interesting the 1960s, 1980s to being seen as in some ways a moment when many of the things that were most aware of in our own present world really came into existence. History such as nixon land the invisible bridge laura kalmans right star rising, no direction home jeff cowys staying alive, michael foleys front porch politics the
In the early 1970s and i think one of our challenges to think about what some of the consequences of those are and as kim said whether or not these are connected to each other. So, between about 1971 and 1976 and 1977 we first of all, get millions of new voters in this country, right . So you get a constitutional amendment that makes the voting age 18 instead of 21, so thats early in the 1970s. You also get a transformation of the primary system in this country, right . Prior to the 1970s, you had primary systems they were not binding primary systems so the primary system that we all experience that at times has caused the last five or ten years crises of its own, that is also birthed in the early 1970s. You begin to get a transformation that had already started in the 1960s, but comes to true you wigs wigs in the 1970s of the ways in which Congressional Committees are structureded. You get the break down of the old Congressional Committee structure, dominated largely by southern senat