Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 1931
- 2 Life, Death, and Learning in the Cities
- 3 Toward a New Economy, 1890 to 1930
- 4 State Crafting – American Style
- 5 Confronting the World
- 6 Winners and Losers, 1890 to 1930
- 7 New Deal Experiments
- 8 Fighting On God’s Side
- 9 The New Aristocracy, 1946 to 1969
- 10 The Suburban Conquest of the 1960s
- 11 Empire in the American Century
- 12 The Tattered Empire of the 1970s
- 13 The Cracked Core
- 14 The American Solution, 1981 to 2001
- 15 Conservatism: Rhetoric and Realities, 1981 to 2001
- 16 The Hegemony Trap
- 17 The American Dream, 1981 to 2001
- 18 The Creative Society in Danger
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- References
13 - The Cracked Core
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 1931
- 2 Life, Death, and Learning in the Cities
- 3 Toward a New Economy, 1890 to 1930
- 4 State Crafting – American Style
- 5 Confronting the World
- 6 Winners and Losers, 1890 to 1930
- 7 New Deal Experiments
- 8 Fighting On God’s Side
- 9 The New Aristocracy, 1946 to 1969
- 10 The Suburban Conquest of the 1960s
- 11 Empire in the American Century
- 12 The Tattered Empire of the 1970s
- 13 The Cracked Core
- 14 The American Solution, 1981 to 2001
- 15 Conservatism: Rhetoric and Realities, 1981 to 2001
- 16 The Hegemony Trap
- 17 The American Dream, 1981 to 2001
- 18 The Creative Society in Danger
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- References
Summary
If this chapter reads like the front page of a newspaper – full of bad news – well, I hope you won't be too depressed. The fact is that the 1970s were a miserable decade for the United States, for most of its citizens, and especially for its professionals. For personal reasons, the Galambos family shared in this misery. The high points (and there were only three) made the rest of the decade look especially bleak by comparison. It was an unpleasant time for those who lived through it and it's still a difficult era for an optimistic historian to discuss.
I began the decade teaching at Livingston College, in Rutgers University. I had finished my postdoc at Johns Hopkins, and I left Rice and Houston to be on the East Coast, where much of my research was focused. Livingston College provided an open window on the turmoil of the 1970s. The College was designed to be a revolutionary institution, perhaps the only state-subsidized revolutionary movement in modern American history. The College was initially shaped by the demands that higher education be responsive to the civil rights movement, to the New Left's antibureaucratic creed, and to the need to throw open admission to young people whose education had suffered under America's class system.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Creative Society – and the Price Americans Paid for It , pp. 202 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011