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Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s . By Meg Jacobs . New York : Hill and Wang , 2016. viii + 373 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-8090-5847-1 .
Book Reviews
During the past fifteen years, historians have discovered the 1970s--that "pivotal decade" when "something happened" and "the shock of the global" arrived and "brought you modern life," to invoke a few popular titles. Recent scholarship by political historians has pushed back the timing of America's "right turn," downplaying the Ronald Reagan administration and stressing earlier cultural, political, and foreign policy struggles that accompanied economic stagnation, weak productivity growth, and rising global commercial integration. In her much-anticipated new book, political historian Meg Jacobs makes a valuable contribution to this burgeoning field by linking the extended energy crisis of the 1970s to the long arc of American politics. Energy scarcity and the new--and ultimately permanent--dependence on foreign oil were vital, she argues, to the pervasive sense of national weakness and opposition to New Deal-style economic solutions that "helped shift American politics to the right in the 1970s" (p. 7).
Jacobs is at her stylistic and interpretive best on the occasions when she takes a broad view of the politics of energy, explaining the real effects on American political culture of higher energy prices and fuel shortages. In her discussion of unrest within the trucking industry during both the 1973 and 1979 OPEC crises, for example, she effectively and memorably ties...