Contemporary America: 1970 to The Present (Handbook to Life in America, Vol IX)

305 Pages·2009·12.03 MB·English

by  Rodney P. Carlisle

Volume IX
Contemporary America
1970 to the Present
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Volume IX
Contemporary America
1970 to the Present
Rodney P. Carlisle

general editor
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Handbook to Life in America: Contemporary America, 1970 to the Present
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
H andbooks to life in America / Rodney P. Carlisle, general editor.
v. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The colonial and revolutionary era, beginnings to 1783—v. 2. The early
national period and expansion, 1783 to 1859—v. 3. The Civil War and Reconstruction,
1860 to 1876—v. 4. The Gilded Age, 1870 to 1900—v. 5. Age of reform, 1890 to 1920—v.
6. The roaring twenties, 1920 to 1929—v. 7. The Great Depression and World War II,
1929 to 1949—v. 8. Postwar America, 1950 to 1969—v. 9. Contemporary America, 1970
to present.
ISBN 978-0-8160-7785-4 (set : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7174-6 (v. 1 : hc : alk.
paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7175-3 (v. 2 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7176-0 (v. 3 :
hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7177-7 (v. 4 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7178-
4 (v. 5 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7179-1 (v. 6 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-
8160-7180-7 (v. 7 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8160-7181-4 (v. 8 : hc : alk. paper)—ISBN
978-0-8160-7182-1 (v. 9 : hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-2700-2 (e-book) 1. United
States—Civilization—Juvenile literature. 2. United States—History—Juvenile literature. 3.
National characteristics, American—Juvenile literature. I. Carlisle, Rodney P.
E169.1.H2644 2008
973—dc22
2008012630
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Contents
Volume IX
Contemporary America
1970 to the Present
preface vii
1 IntroductIon 1
2 FamIly and daIly lIFe 21
3 materIal culture 35
4 SocIal attItudeS 47
5 cItIeS and urban lIFe 63
6 rural lIFe 79
7 relIgIon 97
8 educatIon 111
9 ScIence and technology 125
10 entertaInment and SportS 139
11 crIme and VIolence 157
12 labor and employment 173
13 mIlItary and WarS 187
14 populatIon trendS and mIgratIon 207
15 tranSportatIon 221
16 publIc health, medIcIne,
and nutrItIon 237
INDeX 253
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Preface
“But how do we know when irrational exuberance
has unduly escalated asset values . . . ?”
—Alan Greenspan
the FlaVor oF daily life in previous eras is usually only vaguely conveyed by
examining the documents of state and the politics of the era. What people ate,
how they spent their time, what entertainment they enjoyed, and how they
related to one another in family, church, and employment, constituted the
actual life of people, rather than the distant affairs of state. While governance,
diplomacy, war, and to an extent, the intellectual life of every era tends to
be well-documented, the way people lived is sometimes difficult to tease out
from the surviving paper records and literary productions of the past.
For this reason in recent decades, cultural and social historians have turned
to other types of physical documentation, such as illustrations, surviving ar-
tifacts, tools, furnishings, utensils, and structures. Statistical information can
shed light on other aspects of life. Through examination of these and other
kinds of evidence, a wholly different set of questions can be asked and tenta-
tively answered.
This series of handbooks looks at the questions of daily life from the per-
spective of social and cultural history, going well beyond the affairs of gov-
ernment to examine the fabric and texture of what people in the American
past experienced in their homes and their families, in their workplaces and
schools. Their places of worship, the ways they moved from place to place,
the nature of law and order and military service all varied from period to
period. As science and technology advanced, the American contributions to
those fields became greater and contributed to a different feel of life. Some
of this story may be familiar, as historians have for generations commented
vii
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viii Contemporary America
on the disparity between rural and city life, on the impact of technologies
such as the cotton gin, the railroad and the steamboat, and on life on the
advancing frontier. However in recent decades, historians have turned to dif-
ferent sources. In an approach called Nearby History, academic historians
have increasingly worked with the hosts of professionals who operate local
historical societies, keepers of historic homes, and custodians of local records
to pull together a deeper understanding of local life. Housed in thousands of
small and large museums and preserved homes across America, rich collec-
tions of furniture, utensils, farm implements, tools, and other artifacts tell a
very different story than that found in the letters and journals of legislators,
governors, presidents, and statesmen.
FreSh dIScoVerIeS
Another approach to the fabric of daily life first flourished in Europe, through
which historians plowed through local customs and tax records, birth and
death records, marriage records, and other numerical data, learning a great
deal about the actual fabric of daily life through a statistical approach. Aided
by computer methods of storing and studying such data, historians have
developed fresh discoveries about such basic questions as health, diet, life-
expectancy, family patterns, and gender values in past eras. Combined with a
fresh look at the relationship between men and women, and at the values of
masculinity and femininity in past eras, recent social history has provided a
whole new window on the past.
By dividing American history into nine periods, we have sought to pro-
vide views of this newly enriched understanding of the actual daily life of
ordinary people. Some of the patterns developed in early eras persisted into
later eras. And of course, many physical traces of the past remain, in the form
of buildings, seaports, roads and canals, artifacts, divisions of real estate,
and later structures such as railroads, airports, dams, and superhighways.
For these reasons, our own physical environment is made up of overlapping
layers inherited from the past, sometimes deeply buried, and at other times
lightly papered over with the trappings of the present. Knowing more about
the many layers from different periods of American history makes every trip
through an American city or suburb or rural place a much richer experi-
ence, as the visitor sees not only the present, but the accumulated heritage
of the past, silently providing echoes of history.
Thus in our modern era, as we move among the shadowy remnants of a
distant past, we may be unconsciously receiving silent messages that tell us:
this building is what a home should look like; this stone wall constitutes the
definition of a piece of farmland; this street is where a town begins and ends.
The sources of our present lie not only in the actions of politicians, generals,
princes, and potentates, but also in the patterns of life, child-rearing, educa-
tion, religion, work, and play lived out by ordinary people.
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Preface ix
Volume Ix: contemporary amerIca
As in prior years, the material culture and social lifestyle of Americans in the
decades following 1970 was shaped by the changing winds of international
affairs, as well as by the forces of technological innovation, economic cycles,
and population shifts. In the early 1970s, the United States struggled to bring
an end to its involvement in Vietnam, with the withdrawal of troops in 1973
under a truce agreement. Two years later, North Vietnam mounted a full-
scale invasion of the South, and Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troops and
Viet Cong insurgents. As a consequence, many South Vietnamese who had
fought against the Communists fled the country as refugees. In neighboring
Cambodia, a brutal regime under the Khmer Rouge conducted mass execu-
tions, also leading to tens of thousands of Laotians emigrating as political
refugees. Thus, in the middle and late 1970s, for the first time in American
history, the United States saw massive immigration from Southeast Asia. At
the same time, harsh economic conditions in Mexico and Central America
drove both legal and illegal immigration to the United States.
Technology continued to bring both subtle and obvious changes to the
American lifestyle. Although various forms of color television had been in-
vented in the 1930s and 1940s, regular color television broadcasting began
in the 1950s. By 1980, about half the television sets sold in the United States
were capable of receiving color broadcasts. In 1975, Sony Corporation intro-
duced the Betamax video taping system, and in 1976 JVC introduced the VHS
tape format. For the next decade, the two systems competed for dominance in
the market, with tape-rental stores offering both formats. By 1993, no more
Betamax tapes were being sold, as the VHS format emerged victorious in the
competition. A decade later, the laser-readable compact disc format began
the process of supplanting tape as the medium for recording television and
motion pictures for home viewing.
The first cell phone broadcast towers were experimentally introduced in
1973, with the first large and bulky cell phones marketed by Motorola in 1983.
Weighing two pounds, and extremely costly, over the next years, both the size
and cost of the phones declined, and by the end of the century, cell-phone use
had spread across all age sectors and around the world. Phones were made
smaller and lighter, and new features were added.
Other electronic technologies proliferated through the 1980s and 1990s,
affecting daily life in subtle and obvious ways. Perhaps the most significant
was the development of the Internet in the 1990s, allowing individuals with
home computers connected via telephone lines (and later by coaxial cable
and by wireless) to communicate with other computers. By the turn of the
century, e-mail usage and Internet access to research and commercial sites
had become commonplace, allowing innovations such as online shopping,
online publishing, and rapid international communication. Social commen-
tators noted that the communication revolution created a phenomenon of
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