New Title: A History of the Seventies

Oil crises, microwaves, men with collar-length hair, tulip chairs, terracotta tiles, the Bee Gees …

What do we talk about when we talk about the Seventies? Was that decade a mere bridge between the momentous decades of the Sixties and Eighties? Or a hodge-podge of colorful surface details? When one peers beneath this surface, what political, economic and cultural developments are uncovered? And to what extent did this decade shape the course of the latter 20th century?

Bas Dianda’s new book aims to uncover (and discover) the extraordinary transformative capacity of this era, showing how the decade made its mark on history for years to come. The methodology is grounded in a ‘history of developments’: the first part traces the economic, political and cultural trends which prevailed during that decade, before exploring the legacy of the Seventies, how its wide repercussions affect us to this day.

A History of the Seventies will be of interest not only to historians and economists specializing in the period, but also sociologists and those intrigued by the singularity of the 1970s.