From the Kent State shootings (1970), to the Watergate scandal (1972-74), to the end of the Vietnam War (1965-73), to the Three Mile Island disaster (1979) and the Iran hostage crisis (1979), the dominant key of seventies America can be characterized as skepticism—about the rightness of U.S. expansionism on the one hand, and about possibilities for substantive change in U.S. domestic affairs on the other. Both instances of scepticism point to the decade's overall disenchantment with big government, a feeling which, by the nineties, would split into a left-winged critique of big corporations thought to control big government with big money, and a right-winged reaction against big government (controlled by international elements?) thought to infringe on the rights of individual American citizens. The American seventies, from other perspectives, however, wore an expression hard to read because it was in transition; from this perspective, the seventies was...