Reasserting America in the 1970s

The 1970s, we now know, was no mere period of economic and cultural drift, but also a crucial era for recalibrating the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world. Reasserting America in the 1970s offers considerable insight into this key shift. Particularly welcome is the attention to international perspectives on U.S. initiatives in cultural diplomacy. - Thomas Borstelmann, E.N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, is the author of The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012). This is a superb collection of essays on a nodal decade of the 20th century. The editors have assembled a group of top-notch historians of the Cold War to discuss how the United States and its public diplomacy responded to the alleged crisis of U.S. power and hegemony, and to the perceived decline of America's cultural and political appeal. - Mario Del Pero, Professor of International History, Paris Institute of Political Studies, France, is the author of The Eccentric Realist. Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (2009). Substantive in content, perceptive in analysis, and exquisitely curated, the essays comprising Reasserting America explain how the country's public diplomats struggled to sell the United States to a skeptical world in the aftermath of Vietnam and Civil Rights. This volume offers novel perspective on U.S. foreign policy in an era of turbulence and unease, when America's global repute swerved between ignominy and redemption. Juxtaposing American purposes and global responses, Reasserting America makes original and significant contributions to historical scholarship on the United States and the World. - Daniel Sargent, Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, USA, is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (2015). If you thought you understood the 'long 1970s' think again. Reasserting America in the 1970s is a fresh and provocative account of a decade now seen as an historic turning point. Its successful integration of hard and soft power enables readers to understand U.S. public diplomacy from multiple perspectives. Each essay adds a new dimension and the sum total is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the past, and thus the present and perhaps the future as well. - Marilyn B. Young, Professor of History, New York University, USA, is the author or editor of many books including The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991). -- .