Happy Days

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The 1970s are frequently seen as a watershed period, an era from which the sources of 21st-century American culture began to flow. But the 1970s are also seen as a peculiarly backward-looking time, seen by many critics as morbidly nostalgic for times before the wrenching changes that were associated with the 1960s. Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America explores the relationship of 1970s American culture to the pre-Sixties past through four case studies: representations of the 1950s; the emergence of neo-noir films and the reimagination of the mid-20th-century figure of the hardboiled private investigator; reflections on the Revolutionary past on the occasion of the Bicentennial; and the legacy of slavery in the works of Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. Far from mere nostalgia, Americans' diverse reimaginings of the past were a significant part of what made the 1970s so culturally foundational for the decades to come.