The Gin Game | Historical Context

The Gin Game Historical Context

The 1970s

The Gin Game was written mostly in 1976, the heart of the decade. In the 1970s, the various social movements of the turbulent 1960s, such as the Civil Rights movement and the sexual revolution, reached fruition. For example, women were admitted to the various military academies for the first time. Despite the myth that nothing much happened in the 1970s, it was a historically important time in which a vice president and a president of the United States resigned and this country found itself with a president, Gerald Ford, who had not been elected to the office. He had been appointed to the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew resigned because of scandals and then succeeded the Republican president Richard Nixon. Nixon had resigned over the Watergate scandal, a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee during his reelection campaign in 1972 that was found to have been the...
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