This week on the Lectures and History podcast, University of Texas professor Mark Lawrence

examines the rise of former President Ronald Reagan and his influence on the conservative movement.

In his lecture, Professor Lawrence explores the policy of President Reagan's first term,

including the implementation of Reaganomics.

This was an approach centered on economic deregulation and significant tax cuts.

From 2020 to 2024, Professor Lawrence served as director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum.

His research focuses on U.S. foreign relations, presidential history, the Vietnam War,

international history, and decolonization. More after this.

All right, well, good morning everyone. I'd like to begin a lecture that will mostly discuss Ronald Reagan in the first half of the 1980s

with just a small bit of recap over where we've been in recent days in our class.

And I think as you'll recall, we have been focused in the last few class periods on this very important turning

point that I've tried to convince you took place in the United States in the late 1960s

and early 1970s, where the long period of enormous prosperity, of ever greater American

productivity, of really unchallengeable American power

on the global stage, began to dwindle, and the United States experienced a series of setbacks.

And just as a reminder of what some of those setbacks were that played out across the late 60s and especially across the 1970s, you see setbacks in the economic realm, right?

This period of stagflation when the misery index inflation plus unemployment soared to levels that Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s couldn't have imagined.

This was also a period when Americans worried about social breakdowns. Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s couldn't have imagined.

This was also a period when Americans worried about social breakdown.

It seemed as though American society was cracking up in some ways.

And one way to capture that is with the rising crime rate across the 1960s.

And, of course, this would remain a prevalent problem in the United States in the 1970s. It was a period of political scandal of declining trust in public authority.

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