There’s another thread running right now here in IMHO about the the 1970’s which also discusses specific notable events.
Everybody is talking about their favorite specific event --in various fields: musical (Woodstock, Altamont), political (Nixon resigning) ,historical (Kent State, Martin L King assassination), etc.
But I’m gonna disagree with the whole concept.
Events are interesting, and we remember them. But they don’t change your life. Your read it in the newspaper, and then the next day you still get up and go to work as usual
I’d say that the “new era” of the 70’s, wasn’t defined by any individual events that you saw on the news.
It was defined by a new, and huge, threat that affected every single person in his own personal life: the oil crisis.
In October 1973,the price of gasoline jumped from 19 cents per gallon to over a dollar. (Minimum wage was just over $1 an hour).And more importantly–the crisis resulted in a severe shortage of gas at the pump. Suddenly people were in a panic over how to live their daily lives, how to get to work.
People --everybody, rich and poor, realized that this was a problem which they and the government simply had no ability to solve. The optimism of the 1960’s died, and new angst was born. Previously, there were a lot of problems–civil rights, riots, Vietnam and the draft, etc–but everybody knew that there was a way to solve those problems, which the government had the power to implement.
The oil crisis was a deep shock, because it left everybody feeling powerless, and scared, facing a situation where other nations defined the problem and the American government was helpless.
Over a period of a year or two, a whole new psychology developed,as people realized that they had lost control–not by something they read in the newspaper, but by something they experienced hard in their own personal lives.