Next on lectures in history, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Professor Vincent Canato

teaches a class about the culture and economics of the 1970s. He talks about the 1973 oil crisis,

demographic changes in different regions, and the rise of new types of music such as disco.

His class is about an hour and 15 minutes.

So today we're going to discuss, we're going to give an overview of America in the 1970s.

Remember in the beginning of the semester we talked about how it takes a bit of time for historians to understand what an era is about, maybe 25 years of perspective at least.

For a while, the 1970s were kind of seen as a bit of a joke of a decade, right?

Bell bottoms, disco, bad hair.

In recent years, historians have seen the 1970s is actually very important.

In some ways, more important than the 1960s, which seems to get a lot of the attention.

And one of the themes that historians have talked about is calling this era the age of limits.

And we'll get to a little bit about what that means.

So we'll talk about that, but we'll also talk about, there's the question mark.

Now, was it really an age of limits? And we'll discuss the import of the decade and the influence

that it's had, not just on the 1980s, but really down to our time today.

Recapping what we had talked about earlier, we see in the 1970s a pretty profound loss

of faith in American institutions, driven by Nixon's resignation over Watergate in 1974,

the final end of the Vietnam War in 1975, you see the famous iconic photo of the helicopter

atop the U.S. Embassy taking out the last of the Vietnamese, soon-to-be refugees, out of the country.

The loss of the war was devastating in many ways for the United States.

It really showed that one of the world's superpowers had a big Achilles heel, and it had

profound effects on the military, on America at home.

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