| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies. By Edward D. Berkowitz. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 283 pp. $29.50, ISBN 0-231-12494-5.)
Among postwar decades, the 1970s has been one of the more forgettable. The United States experienced economic trouble, international decline, a president who resigned and others voted out of office, and quirky fads such as streaking, pet rocks, and citizens band radio.	1
Not surprisingly, the decade has attracted few scholarly surveys and college courses devoted to its study. Edward D. Berkowitz's Something Happened is a concise glimpse of the era. The book's odd title directly challenges Peter N. Carroll's assessment of the decade, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened (1982), which helped fix the concept of the seventies as a nonevent. Berkowitz gamely tackles economic issues, not the decade's most cheerful aspect yet one of its most important. His use of statistics is deft, and he tries to illustrate the seminal changes that set the seventies apart from other postwar decades. Selected case studies are enlightening; Berkowitz examines Elizabeth, New Jersey, home of a sewing machine factory, and Ohio's steel center, Youngstown, as examples of cities whose decline reflected U.S. deindustrialization.	. . .

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