How did the energy crisis change American politics and society?
Brands, Chapter 8: Days of Malaise, 1974-79
- Dirty Laundry and Family Jewels (pp. 187-92)
- Running on Empty (pp. 192-97)
- A Ford, Not a Lincoln; A Carter, Not a Ford (pp. 197-99)
- Beyond Containment (pp. 199-202)
- Neither Confidence… (pp. 202-04)
- … Nor Decisiveness (pp. 204-07)
- Trapped in Tehran (pp. 207-09)
- The Bad News Gets Worse (pp. 209-212)
Image Gateway
From the FBI COINTELPRO FILES
1964 “Suicide letter” sent by FBI to blackmail Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (National Archives)
From Wallace to Carter –Politics in the South
The Nixon campaign was not the only one playing to the fears and resentments of American voters in 1968. Independent candidate and Alabama governor George Wallace offered his own version of right-wing populism (“law and order”) to help stoke support.
George Wallace, (Ind) “Law and Order” (1968)
Read Clara Blackwell’s oral history of life in post-segregation Mississippi
Rise of Jimmy Carter
Understanding Watergate
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post
Crisis of Confidence
“It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.” –President Jimmy Carter, July 1979
Iranian Hostage Crisis (1979)
Iranian Hostage Crisis, Tehran, 1979
“Spent ten months in solitary confinement. I was routinely beaten. I slept on bare concrete floors a lot of the time. I was often handcuffed. I sat in a room in solitary with a guy sitting ten feet away pointing a gun at me. I was never allowed to write a letter. My parents did not know I was alive until December 1980. Nor did the State Department. One of the guards smuggled a letter out for me.” —Michael Metrink0, American hostage in Iran, quoted in oral history by Martin Vatanka, History 118, Spring Semester, 2021