The Seventies

"Vancouver in the Seventies presents 149 exclusive photos from the Vancouver Sun's extensive collection along with fascinating essays."--

Most of us think of the 1970s as an "in-between" decade, the uninspiring years that happened to fall between the excitement of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution. A kitschy period summed up as the "Me Decade," it was the time of Watergate and the end of Vietnam, of malaise and gas lines, but of nothing revolutionary, nothing with long-lasting significance. In the first full history of the period, Bruce Schulman, a rising young cultural and political historian, sweeps away misconception after misconception about the 1970s. In a fast-paced, wide-ranging, and brilliant reexamination of the decade's politics, culture, and social and religious upheaval, he argues that the Seventies were one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades. The Seventies witnessed a profound shift in the balance of power in American politics, economics, and culture, all driven by the vast growth of the Sunbelt. Country music, a southern silent majority, a boom in "enthusiastic" religion, and southern California New Age movements were just a few of the products of the new demographics. Others were even more profound: among them, public life as we knew it died a swift death. The Seventies offers a masterly reconstruction of high and low culture, of public events and private lives, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Evel Knievel, est, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. From The Godfather and Network to the Ramones and Jimmy Buffett; from Billie jean King and Bobby Riggs to Phyllis Schlafly and NOW; from Proposition 13 to the Energy Crisis; here are all the names, faces, and movements that once filled our airwaves, and now live again. The Seventies is powerfully argued, compulsively readable, and deeply provocative.

The Seventies is must reading for anyone who wants to revisit that glam decade and the contributions it made to our culture. The contributors take you on a fascinating journey that looks at the Black Panthers, Jonestown, glam rock, black action films and gay male subcultures as well as including queer rereadings of cultural phenomena, examinations of clothing and seventies bodies, and an essay on the meaning of sound in the seventies.

"The publication "Beginning with the Seventies" binds together four exhibitions (GLUT, Radial Change, Collective Acts, Hexsa'am) held at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery between 2018-2019. Part art exhibition, part research project, the book investigates the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds--feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing--began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate. Categorized by exhibition, each section of "Beginning with the Seventies" takes a different approach to the theme, curating together over 70 artists and writers."--

Extract: This report identifies structural changes and trends in the composition of the nonmetro labor force between 1973 and 1979, and evaluates the labor force performance of different population subgroups in the seventies. These subgroups are race, sex, and age. The report also suggests underlying causes of the major changes and the likelihood of particular trends continuing into the eighties.