development, race and American politics, and public policy. He has also written extensively about the development of American democracy and the links between American and comparative politics.
His most recent book is Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (2020), co-authored with Suzanne Mettler.
[The Page 99 Test: Four Threats]
At Five Books Eve Gerber interviewed Lieberman about five books helpful to understand Carter and the context in which he served and was elected. From their discussion of one of Lieberman's picks:
[Gerber] Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States (1977-1981), ran as a Washington outsider, a born-again boy from rural Georgia who could redeem the nation during a difficult decade—one plagued by inflation, unemployment and oil shocks, overhung by Watergate and withdrawal from Vietnam, and animated by rising demands for gender and racial inequality. Since the decade is not remembered fondly, it’s no surprise that the president who oversaw the sunset of the seventies was not regarded highly for many years after he lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan in 1980.Read about the other books on the list.
Your first book is a cultural and political history of the decade. Please introduce us to Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.
[Lieberman] To understand Jimmy Carter and his presidency, it’s important to understand the context in which he was elected and served as president. For a long time, people looked back at the 1970s as an in-between decade. The sixties were the start of the Vietnam war and counterculture, the time of the civil rightsmovement, student protests and the maturing of the baby boomers. The Eighties were the Reagan era, the beginning of a new conservative regime in the United States. And for a long time, the 1970s were seen as just the transition from the sixties to the eighties. In recent years, historians have been paying more careful attention to what was going on in the seventies and identifying the decade as an important turning point in American politics. That’s what Jefferson Cowie’s book, among others, does.
The seventies were a time of economic transition. We begin to see the first inklings of big changes in the American economy. Deindustrialization leads to the disappearance of jobs that had sustained the American working class for most of the 20th century and the hollowing out of cities that used to be industrial powers. This big economic transformation is the thrust of Cowie’s book. Situating the Carter presidency amid the changing economic landscape, the decline of the industrial economy, the slide of the working class and the rise of the service economy in the United States is important to understanding...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
