The University of North Carolina Press

336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 18 illus., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3094-9

Published: April 2007

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5797-7

Published: April 2007

No Direction Home

The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980

By Natasha Zaretsky

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Between 1968 and 1980, fears about family deterioration and national decline were ubiquitous in American political culture. In No Direction Home, Natasha Zaretsky shows that these perceptions of decline profoundly shaped one another.

Throughout the 1970s, anxieties about the future of the nuclear family collided with anxieties about the direction of the United States in the wake of military defeat in Vietnam and in the midst of economic recession, Zaretsky explains. By exploring such themes as the controversy surrounding prisoners of war in Southeast Asia, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, and debates about cultural narcissism, Zaretsky reveals that the 1970s marked a significant turning point in the history of American nationalism. After Vietnam, a wounded national identity--rooted in a collective sense of injury and fueled by images of family peril--exploded to the surface and helped set the stage for the Reagan Revolution. With an innovative analysis that integrates cultural, intellectual, and political history, No Direction Home explores the fears that not only shaped an earlier era but also have reverberated into our own time.

About the Author

Natasha Zaretsky is assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Reviews

"[An] exemplary and richly suggestive work. . . . This is a powerful book on how the multiple traumas of the 1970s reshaped how Americans looked at themselves and the world."
--The Journal of American History

"Provides a useful introduction to major themes of the decade. . . . An intelligent, subtle, and well-researched work on a complex and significant part of recent US history."
--CHOICE

"Should serve as a model for future scholarly inquiry."
--Journal of Southern History

Natasha Zaretskys book is a tour de force that marshals sociology, economics, and psychology to explain how Americans, once sure of their destiny, plunged in the 1970s into a profound pessimism not only about their place in the world, but also about the integrity of their own institutions--from the government in Washington to the home and hearth. This pessimism--combining a sense of national peril with a fear of moral and personal decline--gave rise to the Republican realignment of the 1980s and underlay the conservative revival after September 11, 2001. Anyone who wants to understand the politics of the last three decades needs to read Zaretskys startlingly original book.
--John B. Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic and author of The Folly of Empire

"Zaretsky draws on an imaginative range of sources, both published and archival, to discuss the changing American family during the 1970s. The book emerges as the best commentary I know about the family during this period."
--Peter N. Carroll, author of It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s

"No Direction Home offers a powerful and richly original analysis of American culture in the 1970s. Zaretsky's brilliant insights into this misunderstood decade provide a compelling argument demonstrating how anxieties about national decline were expressed through anxieties about familial decline."--Judith E. Smith, University of Massachusetts-Boston