The Other Eighties
A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this engaging new book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than many remember—one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and ‘70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics.
Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering in a new era of progressive reforms but in effecting change in areas from professional life to popular culture, while beating back an even more forceful political shift to the right. Martin paints an indelible portrait of these and other influential, but often overlooked, movements: from on-the-ground efforts to constrain the administration's aggressive Latin American policy and stave off a possible Nicaraguan war, to mock shanties constructed on college campuses to shed light on corporate America's role in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. The result is a clearer, richer perspective on a turbulent decade in American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin, a history professor at Bryant University in Rhode Island, aims to get past "reaganocentric" views of the '80s by chronicling the efforts of the diminished but far from dead political left to minimize what they saw as the negative effects of President Reagan's conservative domestic and foreign policies. Martin covers much ground, exploring the left's efforts hardly secret, either then or now to influence the culture wars, nuclear disarmament, South African apartheid, interventionist Central American policies, abortion rights, and gay rights. Martin writes with a welcome evenhandedness and a knack for choosing small events that speak for the larger context, annotating each political battle with insights into the movement's legacy. His descriptions of the success of Act Up in bringing attention to the AIDS epidemic, college students' building of shantytowns to focus attention on South African apartheid, and the women's movement's efforts to protect abortion rights are all excellent, as is his description of the arts as a counterweight to the Reagan cultural agenda. This is a valuable picture of the complex political cross-currents that swirled in a decade too often seen simplistically as "Morning in America."