1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco ...still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.
1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.
Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books:
Informed and perceptive —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters
Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today. —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream
This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative...Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch. —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History
"They called it the Reagan revolution," Ronald Reagan noted in his Farewell Address. "Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values ...and our common sense." Nearly two decades after that 1989 speech, debate continues to rage over just how revolutionary those Reagan years were. The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction identifies and tackles some of the controversies and historical mysteries that continue to swirl around Reagan and his legacy, while providing an illuminating look at some of the era's defining personalities, ideas, and accomplishments. Gil Troy, a well-known historian who is a frequent commentator on contemporary politics, sheds much light on the phenomenon known as the Reagan Revolution, situating the reception of Reagan's actions within the contemporary liberal and conservative political scene. While most conservatives refuse to countenance any criticism of their hero, an articulate minority laments that he did not go far enough. And while some liberals continue to mourn just how far he went in changing America, others continue to mock him as a disengaged, do-nothing dunce. Nevertheless, as Troy shows, two and a half decades after Reagan's 1981 inauguration, his legacy continues to shape American politics, diplomacy, culture, and economics. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush modeled much of their presidential leadership styles on Reagan's example, while many of the debates of the '80s about the budget, tax cutting, defense-spending, and American values still rage. Love him or hate him, Ronald Reagan remains the most influential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and one of the most controversial. This marvelous book places the Reagan Revolution in the broader context of postwar politics, highlighting the legacies of these years on subsequent presidents
and on American life today.
In Euromissile
s, Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear
crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the
globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear
superpowers ...against one another, Europe was the principal
battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and
missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations
and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles-intermediate-range
nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of
war-highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed
between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable
and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their
time. At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the
weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark
against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain
about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the
missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit
meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general
secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War
turned. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and
alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and
nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a
long view of the strategic crisis-from the emerging dilemmas of
allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF
Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and
sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and
its culmination.
The Reagan Moment Hunt, Jonathan R; Miles, Simon; Inboden, William
2021
eBook
In The ReaganMoment, the ideas, events, strategies, trends, and movements that shaped the 1980s are revealed to have had lasting effects on international relations: The United States went from a ...creditor to a debtor nation; democracy crested in East Asia and returned to Latin America; the People's Republic of China moved to privatize, decentralize, and open its economy; Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda; and relations between Washington and Moscow thawed en route to the Soviet Union's dissolution. The Reagan Moment places US foreign relations into global context by examining the economic, international, and ideational relationships that bound Washington to the wider world.Editors Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles bring together a cohort of scholars with fresh insights from untapped and declassified global sources to recast Reagan's pivotal years in power. Contributors: Seth Anziska, James Cameron, Elizabeth Charles, Susan Colbourn, Michael De Groot, Stephanie Freeman, Christopher Fuller, Flavia Gasbarri, Mathias Haeussler, William Inboden, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Elisabeth Mariko Leake, Melvyn P. Leffler, Evan D. McCormick, Jennifer Miller, David Painter, Robert Rakove, William Michael Schmidli, Sarah Snyder, Lauren Frances Turek, James Wilson
In the moments before his weekly radio address hit the airwaves in 1984, Ronald Reagan made an off-the-record joke: "I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five ...minutes." As reports of the stunt leaked to the press, many Americans did not find themselves laughing along with the president. Long a fervent warrior against what he termed the "Evil Empire, "by the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted growing domestic opposition to his revival of the Cold War. While numerous histories of the era have glorified the "Decade of Greed, "historian Andrew Hunt instead explores the period's robust political and cultural dissent. We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes focuses on a striking array of protest movements that took up issues such as the nuclear arms race, U.S. intervention in Central America, and American investments in South Africa. Hunt's new history of the eighties investigates how film, television, and other facets of popular culture critiqued Washington's Cold War policies and reveals that activists and cultural rebels alike posed a more meaningful challenge to the Cold War's excesses than their predecessors in the McCarthy era.
Two-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar has been one of the most widely respected foreign policy experts in Congress for over three decades. In this illuminating ...profile, John T. Shaw examines Lugar's approach to lawmaking and diplomacy for what it reveals about the workings of the Senate and changes in that institution. Drawing on interviews with Lugar and other leading figures in foreign policy, Shaw chronicles Lugar's historic work on nuclear proliferation, arms control, energy, and global food issues, highlighting the senator's ability to influence American foreign policy in consequential ways. The book presents Lugar's career as an example of the role Congress can play in the shaping of foreign policy in an era of a strong executive branch. It demonstrates the importance of statesmanship in contemporary American political life while acknowledging the limitations of this approach to governance.
Eleventh Hour Shafie, David M
2013, 2013-09-01, 20130101
eBook
<!CDATA Pres. Jimmy Carter issued last-minute rules immediately before leaving the White House, creating frustration for the incoming Reagan Administration. As George W. Bush prepared to cede the ...Oval Office to Barack Obama almost three decades later, he ordered more than thirty last-minute policy changes, quickly finalizing the rules before the Obama Administration could overturn them. Presidents are able to bypass Congress and quietly initiate significant policy changes by using the executive branch’s authority to alter existing statutes. In Eleventh Hour: The Politics of Policy Initiatives in Presidential Transitions , David M. Shafie analyzes how and why five successive presidents have done so at the end of their administrations, offering important new insights for the growing study of the administrative presidency. After assessing transcripts of speeches and staff communications, such as memos from the White House Domestic Policy offices, memos from selected regulatory agencies and the Office of Management and Budget, as well as records in the Clinton, Reagan, George (H. W.) Bush, and Carter Presidential Libraries, Shafie also conducted in-depth interviews with administration personnel charged with formulating and implementing the executive rule changes. Based on his research, Shafie explains end-of-term rulemaking as an instrument of presidential prerogative power by mapping its evolution through five recent presidential transitions and exploring its effectiveness, consequences, and implications. Giving consideration to recent efforts to limit interregnum rulemaking and to overturn specific late-term rules, as well as evaluating the prospects for future presidents to favor this instrument to advance their unfinished domestic policy priorities, Eleventh Hour offers groundbreaking research into the uses of executive power.
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"The election of 1980 did more than break the Democrats' control of the White House and Congress. It also shattered some important assumptions about the character of our voting coalitions and the ...condition of our political parties. It opened some possibilities for the remainder of the century that had not been there before." These reflections by David S. Broder in the introduction to Party Coalitions in the 1980s are echoed in the essays of the twenty-one scholars, party leaders, and candidates in the volume.This book presents a detailed and lively discussion of the past history, present significance, and future implications of coalitions in the American two-party political system. Patrick H. Caddell observed that "Reagan has skillfully huddled a variety of conservative program and issue initiatives under the umbrella of'economic revitalization.'" In that vein, Richard B. Wirthlin argued that "the 1980 presidential election should be viewed as a major ... opportunity to redraft the policy agenda of this country." Realizing that change is one of the few constants in politics, Lipset and his colleagues set forth strategies and guideposts for Republicans and Democrats who sought to build winning coalitions for the elections of the 1980s.
