Life during Wartime: Grassroots America in the 1970s and 1980s

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This application for an AHRC Fellowship seeks support for completion of a major monograph on America in the 1970s and 1980s. I began work on this book six years ago, with the intention of writing a succinct synthesis on the period, one in which I would make a modest historiographical contribution by trying to assert the importance of grassroots politics. But over time, as my research deepened, and as more and more scholars began to write about the same period, two things became apparent: first, that most scholars' tendency to emphasize national political trends was producing a skewed interpretation of the period; second (and related), that although some issues - particularly the so-called 'culture wars' - had been well-covered by scholars, many other issues and movements had been almost entirely overlooked. As a result, the book's scope grew and deepened. It is now a much more ambitious project aimed at completely overturning the prevailing interpretations of post-1960s American history. To date, I have written drafts of the first seven chapters - more than 400 typescript pages. In the last year, my progress has stalled, mostly owing to my (and my family's) move from New York to Sheffield, and adjusting to a new job and a new country. Therefore, this application seeks support to buy the time I need to write the last two chapters of the book, revise the entire manuscript (in coordination with my editor and other scholars), and to research and acquire the rights to reprint the photographs that will accompany the text. At a 60% buy-out, I will be able to keep my commitment to teach my special subject (one of only two to be offered in American history at Sheffield next year), and still be able to complete the book by the end of the 2010-2011 academic year. In all of the most influential monographs on the period, post-1960s America is presented as a bland sequel to two decades in which the nation experienced tremendous social upheaval. The tumult arising from the civil rights movement, the student movement, countercultural challenges, the women's liberation movement, and the impassioned debate and demonstrations over the Vietnam War were, we are told, replaced with a new post-Vietnam consensus. Richard Nixon's 'great silent majority' rejected the liberalism and radicalism of the 1960s, moved to the right politically - leading, ultimately, to the 'Reagan Revolution' - and simultaneously turned inward, away from civic engagement and social protest. Challenging the conventional view that Americans were passive in this period, Life during Wartime examines how citizenship was exercised and reconfigured. Alert to discontinuities between local and national trends, it probes the ways in which politically engaged Americans shaped an era of dynamic grassroots activism, in order to present a more nuanced and accurate account of US political culture from 1970 to the 1990s. By the end of the 1960s, an ethos of organized protest pervaded American society to such an extent that people of all political persuasions took to grassroots organizing. The key factor, I argue, is that in harsh economic times, Americans mobilized at the grassroots in defense of home and family. I call this 'front porch politics.' That is, as Americans looked at their country and their lives from the vantage point of their own front porches (or, in the city, from their front stoops), they saw threats to their individual and family security. Regardless of the cause - the economically-driven withdrawal of services, busing children to force integration, calls for and against equal rights for women and gays, the loss of jobs and farms, toxic waste discoveries, etc.- Americans mobilized in communities large and small, from one end of the country to the other to defend themselves and their families. This may not have been the 'Sixties' activism, but, in some ways, the 1970s and 1980s were more like "the Sixties" than were the 1960s themselves.