Books like The seventies by Shelton Waldrep

Analyzes the American traditions of cutting loose and engaging in mischief to take breaks from work and sobriety, describing the activities of earlier centuries while sharing stories about the entertainments of the modern world.

A grounded exploration of contemporary New York life that examines how money, technology, and culture shape everyday experiences and social relationships.

The cake in kitchen, the house in the suburbs, Mamie in her mink stole, Elvis in his pink Cadillac. It was America in the 1950s, and the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked - and how we looked - mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. This book captures a visual culture reflecting and reflected in the powerful new medium of television. Looking closely at a number of celebrated instances in which the principles of design dominated the public arena and captivated the popular imagination, Karal Ann Marling gives us a vivid picture of the taste and sensibility of the postwar era. From Walt Disney's Wednesday night TV show, the leap was easy to his theme park, where the wildly popular TV characters could be seen firsthand, and Marling conducts us through this heady concoction of real life and fantasy. Next she takes us into the picture-perfect world of Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book of 1950, the runaway bestseller of the decade, and shows us how the look of food, culminating in the TV Dinner, attained paramount importance. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, her book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.

A panoramic look at 1970s America, blending 70 insightful essays with vivid photographs and a comprehensive decade‑long timeline, rich with eyewitness accounts and analysis of the era’s key events, people and ideas.

Examines the political events, popular opinion polls, films, music, and advertising of the 1970s that brought extreme changes to popular American culture.

We are often told that the Victorians were far less violent than their forbears: over the course of the nineteenth century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, violent crime, including homicide, notably declined, and punishments were hidden from public view within prison walls. They were also much more respectable, and actively sought orderly, uplifting, domestic and refined pastimes. Yet these were the very same people who celebrated the exceptionally violent careers of anti-heroes such as the brutal puppet Punch and the murderous barber Sweeney Todd. By drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements patronised by ordinary Londoners this book challenges our understanding of Victorian society and culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, 're-enactments' of high level violence flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers.

"Joy S. Kasson's book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity," yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of American tradition.". "But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian Wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study - richly illustrated - in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture shows us just how we came to imagine our memories."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Seventies offers a 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."--BOOK JACKET.

A social history of the United States during the "roaring twenties." Examines American individualism and the decade that they knew Mah Jong and Mencken, Couéism and Coolidge, Listerine and Lindbergh, as well as Capone, Ford, Babe Ruth, the Teapot Dome, and bathtub gin.

Depicts the evolution of an increasingly style-conscious society from the time when style was an exclusive prerogative of aristocratic elites to today when it fascinates millions.

Susan Bordo explores how cultural images shape body image, politics, and everyday reality, examining cosmetic surgery, media representations of sexuality, and feminist marginalization.

Explore how England’s yearly religious and secular rituals evolved from the medieval period through the early modern era, shaping and reflecting social, political, and religious change.