The Seventies
This article deals with the cultural and social aspects and trends of the 1970s. For a detailed list of events, please see 1970s.
The Seventies in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1970 and 1979 (see: 1970s), but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past several decades.
In America the decade is often referred to as the "Me Decade", a label given by social analyst and writer Tom Wolfe. In a change from The Sixties, the American public largely changed their focus from bettering American society to helping themselves. Instead of social justice, many Americans focused on economic matters, which were worsening as the decade went on.
In much of the world, it is remembered as the decade of the rise of new middle class, challenging old social hierarchies and bringing new hope for successive generation. However these dreams remained unfulfilled for much of the world and hence creating a lingering nostalgia for its passion for change and its hope for a prosperous and egalitarian society.
Worldwide trends in the Seventies
The dynamic world of the 1970s led to the experience of a zeitgeist that emerged from the transition of the global social structure from the end of World War II and the decline of colonial imperialism—to the rise of a newer middle class.
Globally, the 1970s had several features that was similar and definitive across economic levels and regions. These aspects and essence that make up global essence of the 1970s are the defining points of the 1970s: the Bretton Woods system and its subsequent failure, the impact of the contraceptive pill on social-interactional dynamics, and the oil shock of 1973.
The developing nations experienced economic growth that came in the wake of political independence. However several african economies declined and political states became dictatorial regimes. Many middle eastern democracies crumbled into chaotic regimes with pseudo democratic governments. However the rise in global middle class brought about at the same time a challenge to long held social hierarchy. This consequently saw the duality of democratic transition amid increasing information blockade and ever-increasing numbers of people seeking urban life over an agrarian economy.
The 1970s ethos in much of the developing world was characterized by:
- its incessant need to redefine social norms to newer socio-economic system,
- the sheer pace at which they need to adapt to new social influences along with the need to integrate it to their native cultural context, and
- the constant aspiration for a more egalitarian society in cultures that were long colonised and have an even longer history of hierarchical social structure.
Other common global ethos of the seventies world include: increasingly flexible and varied gender roles for women contrasted with even more rigid gender roles for men, the unprecedented socio-economic impact of an ever increasing number of women entering the non-agrarian economic workforce, and the sweeping cultural-religious impact of the Iranian revolution towards the end of the 1970s in 1979.
The global experience of a cultural transition of the 1970s and an experience of a global zeitgeist revealed the inter-dependence of economies since World War II in 1945, and showed the huge impact of American economic policies on the world.
Economy of the Seventies
In much of the world, especially in the Asian economies, the very early 1970s brought about a new expanding middle class. However unlike the Marshall Plan, which had oil at cheap rate to help support its success and to maintain the recovery process of Europe. The oil shock of 1973 together with the ever increasing work force and the entry of women into the labor market brought about the premature end to the blooming job security of the third world economy.
In Continental Europe, the 1970s brought in a surging economy, which brought about a fresh vigour in the concept of the European Union.
In the United States and U.K., toward the middle and end of the Seventies, however, inflation struck, unemployment rose soon after that. World leaders, such as James Callaghan of the United Kingdom, and Jimmy Carter of the United States, could not control it, causing their support to dwindle.
Oil crisis
Economically, the seventies were marked by the energy crisis which peeked in 1973 and 1979. See 1973 oil crisis and 1979 oil crisis. After the first oil shock in 1973 gasoline was rationed in many countries. Especially Europe depended on the Middle East for oil; the US was also affected even though it has its own oil reserves. Many European countries introduced car-free days. In the US, customers with a licence plate ending in an odd number were only allowed to buy gasoline on odd-numbered days, and the same rule applied to straight numbered licence plates. The experience that oil reserves were not endless and technological development was not sustainable without harming the environment ended the age of modernism. As a result, ecological awareness rose.
Social Movements
Environmentalism
The Seventies touched off a mainstream affirmation of the environmental issues early activists from the 60s, such as Rachel Carson warned about. The moon landing that had occurred at the end of the previous decade, transmitted back concrete images of the earth as an integrated life supporting system, and shaped a public willingness to preserve nature. On April 22, 1970, the United States celebrated its first Earth Day in which over two thousand colleges and universities, and roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools participated.
Over the course of the decade, in the US a series of environmentally friendly legislation would be passed. Notable actions included the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the passage of Clean Water Act in 1972, and the enactment of the Endangered Species Act the next year.
The takeoff of environmental thought rose parallel to the increased usage of nuclear power over fossil fuels. However, with the increasing expenses of nuclear power the opposition likewise grew. [1] Opposition to nuclear power became widespread in reaction to the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant on March 28, 1979.
Culture during the Seventies
The Seventies in music
The seventies were a time when new generation of young people were exposed to new media and hence newer ideas in almost every field. TV and motion picture brought to varied audiences images and lifestyle and music from diverse regions and peoples. This led to the emergence of New vocabulary and experimentation in music. After the war the second generation of German musicians began experimenting with music, these included experimental classical music and the tradition of Kraut rock or Kraut music, rooted in the experimental classical music. This later influenced art rock like those of Genesis and experimental progressive rock like Pink Floyd, especially in monumental classical rock compositions like echoes.
Another experimentation in European classical music, was brought about by composer Philip Glass and Michael Nyman with what was to be called Minimalist music. This was a break from the intellectual serial music of the tradition of schoenberg which lasted from the early 1900s to 1960s. Minimalist music sought to appreciate simple music with systematic patterns repeated in complex variations.
These experimentations were also used in several movies made in the early 1970s. In world music the musical collaboration of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and L. Subramaniam was appreciated by a large audience.
The commercial cinemas around the world tended to imitate nuances of disco beats in their movies to present their movies as western and upbeat. These included the increasingly popular Kung-fu movies in far east asia and bollywood movies from India.
To many people, the Seventies will be most remembered for the rise in disco music. First creeping into dance clubs in the mid-Seventies (with such hits as "The Hustle" by Van McCoy), songstresses like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Anita Ward popularized the genre and were described in subsequent decades as the "disco divas." The Village People scored a Top Ten hit with "Y.M.C.A." and the Bee Gees had a string of #1s following their collaboration on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
As quickly as disco's popularity came, however, it fell out of favor with the new decade, and effectively died in 1981, with the popularity of new wave bands such as Blondie and Devo, who both formed their respective bands in the Seventies. Many of the aforementioned singers who became popular during the disco era found themselves out of tune with the 1980s, and were out of work for many years, until a renewed interest in disco brought many of them back to the forefront. Many songs from the disco era are still very popular dance hits and receive continuous airplay in nightclubs throughout the world.
The mid-seventies saw the rise of punk music from its protopunk/garage band roots in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and The Clash were some of the earliest acts to make it big in bot the United Kingdom and the United States. Groups like the clash were noted for the experimentation of style, especially that of having strong reggae influences in their music. Punk music has also been heavily associated with a certain punk fashion and absurdist humor which exemplified a genuine suspicion of mainstream culture and values.
Topics
- The Singer-songwriter movement (Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, etc.)
- Development of Alt-country (Gram Parsons, The Eagles, Emmylou Harris, etc.)
- Heavy metal (Led Zepplin, The Who, etc.)
- Bubblegum pop (Osmonds, Jackson 5, etc.)
- "Art rock" (Genesis, Pink Floyd, etc.)
- Glam rock (David Bowie, Elton John, etc.)
- Popularization of Country music
- Popularization of Reggae
- Minimalist music in European classical music
- Classical rock especially Pink Floyd Echoes (1971 song).
The Seventies in cinema
World cinema
In cinema all over the world, the seventies brought about vigour in adventurous and realistic complex narratives with rich cinematography and elaborate scores. The cultural interaction between aided with TV and visual media and the rise in motion picture technology ushered in a new period of motion picture making.
In European cinema, the failure of the Prague Spring brought about nostalgic motion pictures reminiscent of the ones that celebrate the 1970s itself. These movies expressed a yearning and as a premonition to the decade and its dreams. The Hungarian director István Szabó made the motion picture Szerelmesfilm (1970), which is a nostalgic portrayal and a premonition of the fading of the young 1970s ethos of change and a friendlier social structure. The Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci made the motion picture The Conformist (1970). German movies after the war aksed existential questions especially the works of Rainer Fassbinder. The movies of the swedish director Ingmar Bergman reached a new level of expression in motion pictures like Cries and Whispers (1973).
Asian cinema of the 1970s catered to the rising middle class fantasies and struggles. In the Bollywood cinema of India this was epitomised by the movies of Bollywood superhero Amitabh Bachchan. These movies portrayed adventurous plots with car chase trying to imitate hollywood movies like The French Connection, presented music with Disco beats and also presented the young middle class man as an "angry young man". The women on the other hand were shown as ones who have adopted western values and outfits especially by heroines like Parveen Babi (who was featured on the cover of TIME for a story on Bollywood's success) and Zeenat Aman. However towards the very end of the 1970s, especially after the steep rise in land prices in urban areas and the decline in employment security, the heroines were seen more often as saree-women striving to have a prosperous middle class family especially heroines like Jayaprada and Hema Malini. In this way the cinema of asian region becomes a sociological statement of the social-economic times of the region and its people.
Other movie industry of the region produced fine masterpieces like in Malayalam cinema. Adoor Gopalakrishnan made Swayamvaram in 1972, which got wide critical acclaim. This was followed by the movie Nirmalyam by M.T. Vasudevan Nair in 1973.
Hollywood
The decade opened with Hollywood facing a financial slump, reflecting the monetary woes of the nation as a whole during the first half of the decade. Despite this, the seventies proved to be a benchmark decade in the development of cinema, both as an artform and a business. With young filmakers taking greater risks and restrictions regarding language and sexuality lifting, Hollywood produced some its most critically acclaimed and financially successful films since it's supposed "golden era."
In the years previous to 1970, Hollywood had began to cater to the younger generation with films such as The Graduate. This proved a folly when anti-war films like R.P.M. and The Strawberry Statement became major box office flops. Even solid films with bankable stars, like the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! flopped, leaving studios in dire straights financially. Unable to repay financiers, studios began selling off land, furniture, clothing, and sets acquired over years of production. Nostalgic fans bid on merchandise and collectables ranging from Judy Garland's sparkling red shoes to MGM's own back lots.
More of the successful films were those based in the harsh truths of war, rather than the excesses of the 60s. Films like Patton, about the World War II general, and M*A*S*H, about a Korean War field hospital, were major box office draws in 1970. Honest, old-fashioned films, like Five Easy Pieces and the Erich Segal adaptation, Love Story, were both commercial and critical hits.
One of the most insightful films of the decade came from the mind of a Hollywood outsider, Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman, whose Taking Off became a bold reflection of life at the beginning of the seventies. The 1971 satirized the American middle-class, following a young girl who runs away from home, leaving her parents free to explore life for the first time in years. While the film was never given a wide release in America, it became a major critical achievement both in America and around the world (garnering the film high honors at the Cannes Film Festival and several BAFTA Award nominations).
An adaptation of an Arthur Hailey novel would prove to be one of the most notable films of 1970, and would set the stage for a major trend in seventies cinema. The film, Airport, featured a complex plot, characters, and an all-star cast of Hollywood A-listers and a legends. Airport followed an airport manager trying to keep a fictional Chicago airport operational during a blizzard, as well as a bomb plot to blow up an airplane. The film was a major critical and financial success, helping pull Universal Studios into the black for the year. The film earned senior actress, Helen Hayes and Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and garnered many other nominations in both technical and talent catagories. The success of the film launched a slew of disaster related films, many of which following the same blueprint of major stars, a melodramatic script, and great suspense.
Three Airport sequels followed in 1974, 1977, and 1979, each successor making less money than the last. 1972 brought The Poseidon Adventure, which starred a young Gene Hackman leading an all-star cast to safety in a capsized luxury liner. The film earned an Academy Award for visual effects (and Best Original Song for "The Morning After," as well as numerous nominations, including one for its notable supporting star, Shelley Winters. The Towering Inferno teamed Steve McQueen and Paul Newman against a fire in a New York skyscraper. The film cost a whopping $14 million to produce (expensive for its time), and won Academy Awards for Cinematography, Film Editing, and Best Original Song. The same year, the epic Earthquake featured questionable effects (camera shake and models) to achieve a destructive 9.9 earthquake in Los Angeles. Despite this, the film was one of the most successful of its time, earning $80 million at box office. By the late seventies, the novelty had worn off and the disasters had become less exciting. 1977 brought a terrorist targeting a Rollercoaster, a 1978 Swarm of bees, and a less than threatening Meteor in 1979.
1971 brought a rebirth of the action film, three years after the influential Bullitt. The French Connection, staring Gene Hackman, brought suspense to knew heights with an adrenaline broiling car chase through the streets of New York City, while Get Carter featured gratuitous nudity and A Clockwork Orange featured much blood and gore to complement its complex story. African American film-makers also found success in the seventies with such hits as Shaft and Superfly, and more questionable films, such as Blacula and Blackenstein. Like other sequels in the Seventies, Shaft went on to have two more adventures, each less successful than the last.
An adaptation of a Mario Puzo novel, The Godfather, became one of the best-loved and most respected works of cinema upon its release in 1972. The three hour epic followed a Mafia boss, played by Marlon Brando, through his life of crime. Beyond the violence and drama were themes of love, pride, and greed. The Godfather went on to earn $134 million at American box office, and $245 million throughout the world. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. It's director Francis Ford Coppola was passed over in favor of Bob Fosse and his musical, Cabaret, which also earned an Oscar for its star, Liza Minelli. The Godfather: Part II followed in 1974, with roughly the same principal cast and crew, earning Oscars for star Robert De Niro, its director, composer, screenwriters and art directors. The film also earned the Best Picture Oscar for that year.
The replacement of Sean Connery first with George Lazenby, and then with Roger Moore in the James Bond series created a minor bump for the 60s hit in the seventies. While 1973's Live and Let Die was a moderate success, the following films in the series didn't live up to expectations. The highest-grossing of the seventies Bond films, 1979's Moonraker, is viewed by many as the weakest of the franchise.
Other massively successful films would soon take Bond's place in the seventies. It was at this time that the blockbuster was born. While the 1973 horror classic, The Exorcist was among the top five grossing films of the seventies, the first film given the blockbuster distinction was 1975's Jaws (movie). Released on June 20th, the film about a series of horrific deaths related to a massive great white shark was director Steven Spielberg's first big-budget Hollywood production, coming in at a cool $9 million in cost. The film slowly grew in ticket sales and became one of the most profitable films of its time, ending with a $260 million dollar gross in the United States alone. The film won Academy Awards for its skillful editing, chilling score, and sound recording. It was also nominated for Best Picture that year, though it lost to Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which also won acting awards for Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher).
The massive success of Jaws was eclipsed just two years later by another legendary blockbuster and film franchise. The George Lucas science-fiction epic, Star Wars, hit theater screens in May of 1977, and became a major hit, growing in ticket sales throughout the summer, and the rest of the year. In time earning some $460 million, the good versus evil fantasy set in space was not soon surpassed. The film's breathtaking visual effects won an Academy Award. The film also won for John Williams' uplifting score, as well as art direction, costume design, film editing, and sound. Star Wars effectively removed any specter of studio bankruptcy that had haunted the studios since early in the decade. Another success in visual effects came the same year, with Steven Spielberg's Close Enounters of the Third Kind, another block buster and alien contact set in the wilderness. For the picture, Spielberg received his first Oscar nomination for direction.
Throughout the seventies, the horror film developed into a lucrative genre of film. It began in 1973 with the terrifying The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and starring the young Linda Blair. The film became saw massive success, and the first of several sequels was released in 1977. 1976 brought the equally creepy suspense thriller, Marathon Man, about a man who becomes to target of a former Nazi dentist's torment after his brother dies. The same year, the Devil himself made an appearance in The Omen, about the spawn of Satan. 1978's Halloween was a precurser to the slasher films of the eighties and nineties with its psychopathic Michael Myers. Cult horror films were also popular in the seventies, such as Wes Craven's early gore films Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, as well as Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In the mid-seventies movies began to reflect the disenfranchisment brought by the excesses of the past twenty years. A deeply unsettling look at alienation and city life, Taxi Driver earned international praise, first at the Cannes Film Festival, and then at the Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Leading Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Score (Bernard Herrmann), and Best Picture. All the President's Men dealt with the impeachment of Richard Nixon, while Network portrayed greed and narcissism in both American society and television media. The film won Oscars for Best Actor (Peter Finch), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Supporting Actres (Beatrice Straight), and Best Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky). Thanks to a stellar cast, experienced director, and a poignant story, Network became one of the largest critical successes of 1976.
Another film, Rocky, about an average man turned boxer (played by Sylvester Stallone) won the Best Picture Academy Award that year. The film also became a major commercial success and spawned four sequels through the rest of the seventies and eighties. 1978 brought the successful sequel, Jaws 2, which featured the same cast, but without Steven Spielberg. Another tailor made blockbuster, Dino de Laurentis' King Kong was released, but to less than stellar success. King Kong did mark the first time time a film was booked to theaters before a release date, a common practice today.
The success of Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977 stirred a new trend in movie-making. Annie Hall, love story about a depressed comedian and a free-spirited woman, was followed with more sentimental films, including Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl, the autobiographical Lillian Hellman story, Julia starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and 1978's Heaven Can Wait and International Velvet.
Younger audiences were also beginning to be the focus of cinema, after the huge blockbusters that had attracted them back to the theater. John Travolta became popular in the pop-culture landmark films, Saturday Night Fever, which introduced Disco to middle America, and Grease, which recalled the world of the 1950s. Comedy was also given new life in the irreverent Animal House, set on a college campus during the 1960s. Up in Smoke, starring Cheech and Chong, was another irreverent comedy about marijuana use became popular among teenagers. The new television comedy program, "Saturday Night Live," launched the careers of several of its comedians, such as Chevy Chase, who starred in the 1978 hit Foul Play with rising star Goldie Hawn. Blockbusters like Superman, starring former Love of Life actor Christopher Reeve, were also still popular.
The decade closed with two films chronicling the Vietnam War, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Both films focused on the horrors of war and the psychological damaged caused by such horrors. Christopher Walken and director Michael Cimino earned Oscars for their work on the film, which earned a Best Picture Academy Award. Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep were also nominated for their work in The Deer Hunter. Apocalypse Now won for cinematography and sound, and earned nominations for Robert Duvall and Coppola.
1979 saw the poignant Kramer vs. Kramer, the inspiring Norma Rae, and the nuclear thriller, The China Syndrome. Meanwhile, The Onion Field and And Justice for All focused on the failures of the American judicial system. The year ended with Hal Ashby's subtle black comedy Being There and The Muppet Movie, a family film based on the Jim Henson puppet characters.
The Seventies in television
In the United States
In the United States, television in the Seventies was transformed by what became termed as "social consciousness" programming, spearheaded by television producer Norman Lear. His adaptation of the British television series Til Death Us Do Part, which was called All in the Family, broke down barriers in television censorship code. When the series premiered in 1971, Americans heard the words "fag," "nigger," and "spic" on national television for the first time. All in the Family became the talk of countless dinner tables and water coolers throughout the country, mainly because Americans hadn't seen anything like it before. The show quickly became an overnight sensation and was the highest-rated program on US television schedules from 1971 until 1976 -- to date, only one other series has tied All in the Family for such a long stretch at the top of the ratings. All in the Family spawned numerous spin-offs, such as Maude, starring Bea Arthur. Maude was Edith Bunker's cousin and Archie's archenemy. She stood for everything liberal and was an outspoken advocate of civil rights and feminism. Maude felt most comfortable, however, hiring a black woman as her housekeeper. Maude's housekeeper, Florida Evans (played by Esther Rolle) became popular in her own right and was given her own television series in 1974, Good Times, which proved to be another hit for Lear's production company.
With the rise in socially responsible programming, the television western, a very popular genre in the 1960s, slowly died out. The first casualties were The High Chaparral and The Virginian, both NBC staples, in the spring of 1971. Bonanza suffered a blow when actor Dan Blocker died during surgery in 1972, and the show quietly ended its run the next year. CBS's Gunsmoke outlasted them all, and finally ended its run with a star-studded series finale in 1975. Bonanza actor Michael Landon helped popularize a television adaptation of the popular childrens' book series Little House on the Prairie. Debuting in 1974, the series ran for eight years. Little House's competitor family drama was CBS's The Waltons, which revolved around family unity but during a different time and place -- Virginia during the Great Depression.
By the mid-to-late 1970s, people tired of socially responsible sitcoms, and by extension, the CBS network as a whole. CBS had aired most of Lear's creations and had led the US television ratings since the mid-1950s; since then the network had received a reputation as being the "Tiffany Network," showcasing the best in television. Former CBS Head of Programming Fred Silverman defected to struggling ABC, which saw a glimmer of hope in the early 1970s with the #1 hit show Marcus Welby, M.D., but eventually retreated to its traditional third-place spot. Silverman was instrumental in starting a new movement in American television, which centered around sexual gratification and bawdy humor and situations. Critics called the new era "jiggle television," termed due to the crime-fighting television series Charlie's Angels, which starred up-and-coming sex symbols Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, and Kate Jackson.
Silverman was responsible for green-lighting more risqué sitcoms such as Three's Company, modeled after the British series Man About the House, in which swinging single man Jack Tripper pretended to be gay to live in an apartment with two single women. Mildly controversial at the time, the show quickly became a Top Ten hit in the ratings. ABC also aired Soap, a sitcom that parodied soap operas, and garnered controversy by writing in one of the first homosexual characters on US television. Many stations refused to air the series because of this and other storylines (another storyline consisted of heroine Corinne Tate, played by Diana Canova, lusting after a priest who eventually left the priesthood to marry her).
Silverman's legacy also included the "fantasy" genre, which started in 1977 with The Love Boat. The series involved popular movie and television stars in guest roles as passengers on a luxury cruise liner that sailed up and down the Pacific Coast. Silverman followed up in 1978 with Fantasy Island, starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize. Montalban and Villechaize were the owner and sidekick, respectively, of a luxury island resort where peoples' wishes came true.
Another popular medium in US television moving into the 1970s was the soap opera, which moved from being a genre watched exclusively by housewives to having a sizable audience of men (who largely watched The Edge of Night) and college students; the latter audience helped All My Children gain a devoted following, as it was on during many universities' traditional "lunch period." In a TIME article written about the genre in 1976, it was estimated that as many as 35 million households tuned into at least one soap opera each afternoon, the most popular being As the World Turns, which routinely grabbed viewing figures of twelve million or higher each day. The soap boom spawned a nighttime soap parody, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which made a quick star out of Louise Lasser, who played the eponymous heroine. A rising soap opera toward the decade's end was Ryan's Hope, which capitalized on the everyman success of the film Rocky (despite Ryan's Hope debuting earlier; the show's success came a while after the movie's release). The serial was about an Irish-American family running a pub in New York City, and earned critical acclaim from television critics for its realistic portrayal of an "ethnic" middle-class family in a contemporary setting. The show's matriarch, played by Helen Gallagher, won two Daytime Emmys by decade's end.
Another influential genre proved to be the television newscast, which built on its initial widespread success in the 1960s. Each of the three television networks had widely recognizable and respected journalists helming their newscasts: CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who was voted "The Most Trusted Man in America" many times over, led in the nightly ratings. NBC's John Chancellor and David Brinkley were a strong second, while ABC, perennially third-place in the news department until the 1990s, had a newscast helmed by Howard K. Smith.
Finally, a popular genre in the 1970s was the variety show -- in many respects, it received its last hurrah during this decade. Popular during the 1950s and 1960s, it carried on in the 1970s with The Carol Burnett Show. With a repertory company that included Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner, the veterans series continued to be successful and ran well into the mid-Seventies. NBC aired a variety show of its own, starring African-American comedian Flip Wilson. The Flip Wilson Show became a success and became the first show headed by an African-American comedian to become a ratings winner.
In 1971, while Fred Silverman was still working for CBS, he spotted singing duo Sonny & Cher doing a stand-up concert and decided to turn it into a weekly variety show. In addition to stand-up banter between the husband and wife, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour would also have skits and music (mostly sung by Cher). The show was a ratings winner from the first episode and ran for three years. It was followed in the same vein shortly after by singing group Tony Orlando and Dawn. Another group of singers who received a variety show in the Seventies were two of the famous singing Osmonds -- Donny and his sister Marie. Sid & Marty Krofft set to work on the siblings' series and Donny & Marie premiered on ABC in the winter of 1976. Although the show became very popular, the Osmonds were equally ridiculed for their wholesome image and Mormon moral reputation (on an episode of Good Times, the lead character, Florida, listed three things in the world you just can't do, and one was "Smile wider than Donny and Marie").
In the United Kingdom
Many of American's top television shows in the Seventies were actually recreations of popular British situation comedies (sit-coms).
The Seventies in literature
After the experimentation and sexual subject matter that exemplified some of the sixties' most definitive works of literature, the early 70s brought a return to old-fashioned story-telling. Erich Segal's Love Story was a tender romance that captured America, topping best-seller lists for the better part of the year and producing a successful film adaptation by the end of 1970.
The seventies also saw the decline of previously well-respected writers, such as Saul Bellow and Peter De Vries, who both released poorly received novels at the start of the decade. Meanwhile, Islands in the Stream, a posthumously released Ernest Hemingway novel was released. While Hemingway's classic style shown through, it was criticized as overwrought.
Racism remained a key subject in literature throughout the early seventies. While Madison Jones' A Cry of Absence and Ernest J. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman studied racism in the past, works like that of Nadine Gordimer and Bernard Malamud studied race relations in South Africa and New York respectively.
In the early seventies, John Updike emerged as a major literary figure with the release of Bech: A Book, a semi-autobiographical look at a Jewish novelist, the continuing Rabbit series (including 1971's popular Rabbit Redux), and his numerous subtle, relevant stories. Reflections of the 60's experience also found roots in the literature of the decade through the works of Joyce Carol Oates and Morris Wright. Books like Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner explored the sex, single-parenthood, and the singles life in fresh, intriguing, and even unsettling light.
With the rising cost of hard-cover books and the increasing readership of "genre fiction," the paperback became a popular medium through the popular fiction of Peter Benchley and Thomas Pynchon. Criminal non-fiction also became a popular topic with works such as The Onion Field, written by Los Angeles policeman Joseph Wambaugh and the narrative Helter Skelter, about the infamous Charles Manson killings, written by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.
1975 brought the popular Watership Down by Richard Adams, a juvenile novel about a family of rabbits which found a home in mainstream literary circles. Joseph Heller's middle-age dramatic novel Something Happened, brought the author one of his best received novels since Catch-22. James A. Michener also returned to prominence in the seventies, first with Chesapeake, a story of four families interwoven throughout their interactions in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland, and later with Centennial, a historical novel about a family living in Colorado in the time of the 1870s. In 1976, Centennial was adapted to a popular television miniseries. John Jakes would release a Bicentennial series of novels himself, which helped launch his writing career and were nearly as popular as Michener's book.
E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime became one of the most popular books of 1976 with its unconventional style and satiric nature. Saul Bellow returned with the Pulitzer Prize winning Humboldt's Gift, about a failed poet and a rising playwright. The same year Alex Haley released his immensely popular Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which followed Haley's ancestry, back to the kidnapping of a young black man named Kunta Kinte, who was sold into slavery in the south.
Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward, writers from the Washington Post, published The Final Days in 1976. The best-selling book documented the downfall of President Richard Nixon, and their involvement in his impeachment. Throughout the trial many other books related to Nixon and the Watergate scandal topped the best-selling lists. The same year, Alice Walker published Meridian, about the Civil Rights Movement, and Renata Adler released the feminist classic, Speedboat.
By the late seventies, a former English teacher from Maine had become one of the most popular genre novelists with his tales of horror and suspense. Stephen King's 1974 novel, Carrie, became a best-seller and spawned a popular 1976 film. He followed Carrie with Salem's Lot, a vampire tale; The Shining, a spooky romp set in a deserted hotel; The Stand, a post-apocalyptic shocker; and The Dead Zone, about a comatose man who awakens with psychic abilities. King also released a collection of short stories and two novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
1977 brought many high profile biographical works of literary figures, such as those of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The world of fiction saw a return of the muckraker. Books by John Blair and Robert Engler warned of the problems caused by America's dependence on oil while Sidney Lens' The Day Before Doomsday warned of nuclear annihilation. Mario Puzo's much-awaited follow-up to the The Godfather, Fools Die, was released in 1978 and instantly became a best seller.
Notable works such as William Styron's Holocaust epic, Sophie's Choice rounded out the decade. Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird reflected the comic results of the Watergate scandal while Nadine Gordimer continued to write in favor of an end to Apartheid. By decade's end, Tom Wolfe topped the best-seller lists with The Right Stuff, which celebrated the early NASA test pilots and astronauts.
The Seventies in science and philosophy
The 1970s saw an emergence of a new weltanschauung in the scientific world and philosophical approach. The linear modeling of the natural and social systems gave way to pioneering dynamical non linear approach to the study of phenomena across sciences. Although the roots of these were laid in the 1940s and 1950s, the seventies saw the blooming of these ideas especially with the rise of Artificial intelligence through the works in natural language processing by Terry Winograd (1973) and the establishment of the first cognitive sciences department in the world at MIT in 1979. The fields of generative linguistics and cognitive psychology went through a renewed vigour with symbolic modeling of semantic knowledge while the final devastation of the long standing tradition of behaviorism came about through the severe criticism of skinner's work in 1971 by the cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky.
In evolutionary sciences the idea of Punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould, took hold of the scientific community and redefined the foundations of evolutionary thought.
The Seventies in technology
The birth of modern computing started in the 1970s. The world's first general microprocessor - The Intel 4004, came out in november 1971. C programming language was developed early in the decade with the Unix operating system being rewritten into it in 1973. With "large-scale integration" possible for integrated circuits (microchips) rudimentary personal computers began to be produced along with pocket calculators. Notable home computers released in North America of the era are the Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and Atari 400/800 and the NEC PC-8801 in Japan. The availability of affordable personal computers led to the first popular wave of internetworking with the first bulletin board systems.
The 1970s was also the beginning of the video game era. Atari established itself as the dominant force in home video gaming, first with its home version of the arcade game Pong and later in the decade with the Atari 2600 console (originally called the Video Computer System).
The Seventies in Sports
The Olympics
Domestic issues
In the Middle East
Political authoritarianism in Arab and Middle Eastern states, combined with the occupation of the West Bank by Israel, led to a major increase in terrorism. The Palestinian terror group Black September was involved in plane hijacks and a deadly hostage incident at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany.
In 1975, tensions between Maronite Christian and Muslim factions in Lebanon brought that country to civil war, which would continue sporadically for 20 years.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 transformed Iran from an autocratic pro-west monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to an Islamic, theocratic democracy under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. Distrust between the revolutionaries and Western powers led to the Iran hostage crisis on November 4, 1979 where 66 diplomats, mainly from the U.S., were held captive. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein began to rise to power by helping to modernize the country. One major initiative was removing the western monopoly on oil which later during the high prices of 1973 oil crisis would help Saddam's ambitious plans. On July 16, 1979 he assumed the presidency cementing his rise to power. His presidency led to the breaking off of a Syrian-Iraqi unification, which had been sought under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and would later lead to the Iran-Iraq War starting in the 1980s.
See also: Yom Kippur War, Camp David Accords (1978)
In India and Pakistan
- Indo-Pakistani War of 1971/Bangladesh Liberation War/Concert for Bangladesh (relates back to culture)
In Southeast Asia
In Japan
Due to financial support from the United States and much hard work, Japan's economy surpassed everyone else's in the world in the Seventies, expanding on the economic growth the country received from elaborate building and job growth from the 1964 Summer Olympics, which were held in Tokyo. With a rise in technology and a more urgent need to commute for salaried jobs, the Shinkansen became an efficient tool for people to travel cross-country in a rather inexpensive and quick manner. The first "bullet train" was opened between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964, with further extension to Fukuoka in 1975.
Just as Richard Nixon was resigning from office in the United States, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was facing a scandal of his own. The Diet was concerned about his business practices (specifically, he used the name of a geisha he frequented on land deeds). The first witness to be called was his secretary, with whom he had a romantic affair. To save face, he resigned his post late in 1974, and was replaced by Takeo Miki. When news of Fukuda's embezzlement of the Lockheed Corporation's funds reached Japan in 1976, Prime Minister Miki pushed for Tanaka's arrest. Tanaka, who had become a Diet member, responded in kind by removing support from his government, causing him to lose his spot as Prime Minister. Tanaka would spend the rest of the decade endorsing and later removing support from Prime Ministers when he felt his best interests were not served.
In the United States
At the start of the decade, President Richard Nixon proved to be popular with the American people, in that he sent the last American troops from Vietnam, and took the first steps to normalizing relations with China and the Soviet Union, which he both visited in 1972. Nixon started the process known as détente when he joined the SALT I talks and eventually signed the treaty with Leonid Brezhnev. His high approval ratings led him to be overwhelmingly re-elected in the 1972 election against George McGovern. However, the Watergate scandal erupted soon after which put the entire Nixon administration in jeopardy. Nixon became the first President to resign his post, in 1974, and received a pardon for his involvement in the scandal by new President Gerald Ford later that year, a move which was seen by many as unfavorable.
Ford's pardoning of Nixon, coupled with economic troubles felt by nearly every segment of the American population, cost him the 1976 election, in which he was soundly beaten by Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and former Governor of Georgia. One of the key events that turned the tide in Carter's favor was an embarrassing blunder on Ford's part, in in which he said during a live, televised presidential debate, that Eastern Europe was not under the domination of the Soviet Union. Carter's more personable style resonated with the majority of voters.
Carter did not have any more luck than Ford had in curbing stagflation, as economists had termed it. Carter tried to address the price of imported oil and the subsequent energy dilemmas by creating the United States Department of Energy, but his efforts were largely unsuccessful, leading to the 1979 energy crisis, which was also felt in other parts of the world. Carter's leadership was also challenged abroad, with the most infamous event taking place on November 4, 1979: 66 Americans were captured at the United States Embassy in Iran's capital, Tehran. After two weeks, the women and African-Americans in the group were released, leaving only 52 men in confinement. The Iran hostage crisis was arguably the biggest blow to Carter's administration, and the hostages were only released when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981, succeeding Carter.
The Bicentennial
1976 marked the 200th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and plans were made all year to celebrate the United States Bicentennial.
On July 4, 1976, parties were thrown across the nation on an even larger scale than usual, and historic ships sailed through New York Harbor. President Ford was on hand to officiate the ceremony, which ended in a display of fireworks at Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty was lit up for the occasion, and provided a picturesque backdrop for the fireworks display. The fireworks display was broadcast on national television.
In the United Kingdom
In 1970, the Conservative Party was brought to power under the leadership of Edward Heath. In 1974, Heath lost a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, which led to October elections. Labour was voted back in again, under Harold Wilson, who had led the country from 1964 to 1970. When Wilson retired from the post in 1976, former Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan took over the office. However, failure to assuage the growing energy problem, coupled with rising inflation and unemployment, paved the way for a Tory win in 1979, under Margaret Thatcher's guidance. The world first took notice of Thatcher in 1975 when she became the first woman leader of the Tories; she was subsequently featured on the cover on TIME. Thatcher's rise to Prime Minister, at the tail end of the Seventies, ushered in a new era of changed that would become the trademark of what the Eighties represented throughout the world.
During the Seventies, support for the British royal family was thought to have dwindled, but the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II in 1977 assuaged the family's fears of being irrelevant in a more modern Britain. Elaborate parades and street parties were thrown in the Queen's honour, and the Queen met with millions of her countrymen on a tour throughout the Commonwealth. In spite of such widespread support, an emerging class of people voiced opposition to the monarchy, epitomized in the Sex Pistols' song "God Save the Queen".
See also
References
Crosby, Alfred W. (1995). "The Past and Present of Environmental History". The American Historical Review 100 (4), 1177-1189