Sunday, June 30, 2019

Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

I'm not sure I'm ready for 1974 to be history, because I remember it quite clearly.  OK, so I remember t things like learning how to roller skate, starting first grade, and getting a bike for Christmas more than I remember politics (other than Nixon's resignation, which my parents made me watch because it was history - the same parents who kept 6-month-old me awake so I could say I saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon). As I read Fault Lines, I remembered where I was, or what I was doing when I heard about the events of the last 45 years.  The section on Phyllis Schlafly brought back memories of being a tween feminist at a conservative school, and the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with an all-nighter (history paper and Calculus test). I graduated into the early 90s recession, and a decade later had friends caught up when the dot-com bubble burst.  When I watched Barack Obama's 2004 Democratic Convention speech with my dad, he was an obscure Illinois candidate - how can it be that he left the White House over three years ago, and that my dad is gone? Kruse and Zelizer wrote an engaging overview of recent history, although it reads too much like a survey course.  I would have liked a deeper analysis and a bit more attention to non-political culture, but that would require 3580 pages, instead of the more practical 358.

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