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The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and mu.

Crosscurrents of crisis in 1970s America : trouble abroad, corruption at home, conservatism and the distrust of government, economic insecurity, turning inward -- The rising tide of equality and democratic reform : women in the public sphere, women in the private sphere, the many frontiers of equality, political reform, resistance -- The spread of market values : a sea change of principles, the economy goes south, globalization's gathering speed, from citizenship to deregulation, market solutions for every problem, a freer market, a coarser culture -- The retreat of empires and the global advance of the market : the emergence of human rights, European empires and Southern Africa, the Soviet Empire, the American empire, the Israeli exception, the retreat of the state, China and the hollowing out of socialism -- Resistance to the new hyper-individualism : the environmentalist challenge, religious resurgence at home, religious resurgence in Israel, religious resurgence in the Muslim world, Jimmy Carter as a man of his times -- More and less equal since the 1970s : evidence to the contrary, inclusiveness ascending, markets persisting, unrestrained consumption, inequality rising

"Americans have long considered themselves a people set apart. Yet American exceptionalism is built on a set of tacit beliefs about other cultures. From the founding exclusion of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans to the uneasy welcome of waves of immigrants, from republican disavowals of colonialism to Cold War proclamations of freedom, Americans' ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world--and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves. Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as suspiciously different yet fundamentally sharing American values at heart beneath the layers of culture. Considering race and religion, notions of the American way of life, attitudes toward immigrants, competition with communism, Americans abroad, and the subversive power of American culture, he offers a surprisingly optimistic account of the acceptance of difference. Borstelmann contends that increasing contact with peoples around the globe during the Cold War encouraged mainstream society to grow steadily more inclusive in terms of who could be considered fully American. In a time of resurgent nativism and xenophobia, Just Like Us provides a reflective, urgent examination of how Americans have conceived of foreignness and their own exceptionalism throughout the nation's history"--

After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation's leaders with an embarrassing contradiction. Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America's closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anticommunist alliance. At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle. The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization